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WHERE FLOWS THE MING 



THE RIVER 
DRAGON'S BRIDE 



By 

LENA LEONARD FISHER 

BEING SOME STORY BEADS GATHERED IN SOUTH 
CHINA AND STRUNG ON A THREAD OF MEMORY 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1922, by 
LENA LEONARD FISHER 



Printed in the United States of America 



APR, 



^ m2 



©CLA659821 






TO THE DEAR TWO, 

MY DAUGHTER AND HER FATHER 

WHO WITH ME WALKED 

CHINESE WAYS 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Where Flows the Ming 1 1 

II. A Chinese Handy Andy 26 

III. The Blight of Beelzebub 43 

IV. A House of Understanding. 60 

V. The Sign of the Cross 73 

VI. The Loosened Grip 84 

VII. The Bandit Trail 97 

VIII. The River Dragon's Bride 124 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Where Flows the Ming , Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

The Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages 12 

The Tombs of Their Ancestors (A Mandarin 

Grave) 36 

"A Thousand Gold" to a Chinese Mother 66 

The Oldest Methodist Church in Asia, at 

Foochow 78 * 

The Struggling Bit of Femininity on the Shore io4 L 
"The Feathery Fronds of the Tall Bamboos" . . 108 
The Bridal Chair 140 




WHERE FLOWS THE MING 

T is a perfectly Oriental proposition 
that when I essay to string upon a 
golden thread of memory some 
stories, lived out before my eyes, 
or told to my eager ears in strange, out-of- 
the-world places by others who had seen 
their slow unfolding; it is entirely Oriental, 
I repeat, that the first bead to slip down the 
shining cord should reflect in its ancient 
carving the face of a man. If such be the 
inevitable, I make my politeness to the spirit 
of the Orient which drives my pen, and 
meekly submit. The "Orient/' being in- 
terpreted, is "Man's Land." History, law, 
tradition, and custom all combine to em- 
phasize the designation. Why not, then, in 
my pretty string of beads, first, the story of 
Handy Andy? 

I never heard his Chinese name, though 
ii 



12 The River Dragon's Bride 

doubtless that most honorable cognomen was 
borne by a hundred generations, or mayhap 
a thousand before him. It was as "Handy 
Andy" that the American Woman Doctor 
introduced him to me in her crude little Hos- 
pital of the Good Shepherd back in the old 
city of Ancestral Abodes. This most ancient 
and delectable city lies in the very heart of 
those purple mountains which enwrap the 
path of the Ming River, remote from 
here, it seems to me to-day, a million miles. 
The trail I followed, at whose finish I found 
the city, the hospital, and finally Handy 
Andy, is a thousand years old — it may be ten 
times that for all I know. Was not the 
dreamy old river on whose tide our house 
boat floated spanned by the "Bridge of Ten 
Thousand Ages," whose hoary grayness 
gave it every evidence of being true to 
name? 

The incoming tide from the sea urged us 
on under its crumbling arches after a hasty 
embarkation from the moss-slippery jetty of 
a city in southern China which was old when 
the Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages was 



Where Flows the Ming 13 

brave and bright with youth. I say a hasty 
embarkation, for though our bed clothes and 
food hampers and general travelers' junk 
had been in readiness for all of two days, 
the little gray house boat, all swept and gar- 
nished for our arrival, must condition her 
going upon the inward tide from the sea, 
which, only a matter of three hours below 
where the old city of Foochow waked and 
slept, received the turbulent and muddy flood 
of the most majestic Ming. In time, how- 
ever, came a runner sent to us by our skipper, 
who down at the jetty with crew mustered — 
five men including himself and his surly son 
—had with true nautical eye detected the 
exact instant when the current of the big 
river turned upward. The message was 
brought by a pig-tailed coolie, and was brief 
and very much to the point. It was delivered 
with ceremonious politeness and was to the 
effect that "The tide is now flowing top-side 
and the boat can walk. Would the most 
honorable foreigners be good enough to very 
much hurry ?" 

So "very much hurry" we did. Sa-ho, 



14 The River Dragon's Bride 

the cook — may the benediction of his honor- 
able ancestors abide forever upon his head ! — 
and Cing-soi the houseman — a gentleman, 
or there never was one — gravely directed the 
baggage coolies, and with polite dignity 
steadied us, as we scrambled down the slimy 
water stairs. A moment later, having 
clutched with fervor the end of the bamboo 
pole obligingly held out to us from his perch 
forward by the skipper of our craft himself, 
we had safely made the distance between 
shore and boat across the bobbing gang- 
plank, and were off. 

There was no poling of the boat to begin 
with. The upward urge of the sea tide was 
all the motor power we needed for the first 
leg of the voyage. Once safely through the 
massive gray arches of the two hoary bridges 
which spanned the Ming at the city, the 
winds came sweeping down from great pine- 
scented heights, filling our white sails with 
rushing life. My heart pounded with a wild 
exultation as we steered straight upstream 
toward the hidden recesses of those hazy 
mountains ahead, piled up range upon range 



Where Flows the Ming 15 

under the glistening, scintillating rays of a 
close-to-tropical sun at noonday. I had em- 
barked upon that dream journey which since 
childhood's day of unrestrained imaginings 
I had always been quite sure I should some 
time pursue. And now the quest was beck- 
oning just as I had always known it would, 
up a mighty and all but unknown river, urged 
on by breezes that had swept across vast 
fragrant spaces into a realm of happenings 
which for me experience had never before 
visualized. 

I reflect upon no other vagabond who has 
treked across earth's unfrequented ways 
when I record here my great wonderment 
that no one of them ever returned to impress 
upon my consciousness the transcendent 
beauties of southern China. Possibly the 
task bulked too large to be even attempted. 
I am quite sure this must be the reason, for 
I find my own pen growing unaccountably 
shy at the first mental suggestion of trying to 
splash upon paper with words any concept of 
the glories which garment the path taken by 
the old Ming into the dusky purple silences 



16 The River Dragon's Bride 

of those mysterious mountain solitudes in far 
Cathay. Range upon range there were of 
shadowy heights, with sky lines which re- 
solved themselves against the gold of the 
dying sun into the lineaments of sleeping 
faces. 

Naturally, in China the mountain faces 
would slumber ! For with all the noisy con- 
tendings through recent years, of us Occi- 
dentals, that China is finally and victoriously 
awake, facts would seem to clearly disprove 
our blatant assertions. Else why have her 
ancestral lands been stolen from her, her an- 
cient national pride humiliated by the for- 
eign aggressor within her gates, her liberty 
curtailed, and her weakness ridiculed? 
China still sleeps! 

Occasionally in her dreams she has turned 
over. Within recent moons her right arm, 
strong, though benumbed by the pressure 
of her body upon it as she has lain in her 
age-long slumber — her right arm, I say, 
moved by some major nerve within her heart 
of hearts, reached out one day and gripped 
the student life of her domain. And the stu- 



Where Flows the Ming 17 

dents of all China, thrilled by that touch, re- 
acted in the Students' Strike with the most 
potent, far-reaching and effectual demon- 
stration against the wicked and unscrupu- 
lous designs of a certain envious foreign 
power that ever emanated from the Middle 
Kingdom. Would that some lover of human 
justice — especially just now, some lover of 
human justice in China — might impress 
upon the Chinese student body everywhere 
that biceps muscles toughen only with the 
using ! 

I distinctly saw the sleeping countenance 
of George Washington in the sun glow along 
the mountain tops that first night on the 
Ming. Fancy, though, the Father of His 
Country asleep in China to-day! It is the 
spirit of Washington, sleepless, strong, virile, 
unconquerable, which is just now being re- 
incarnated in the very fabric of the growing 
body of Chinese students. When, on some 
great day, this spirit shall be clothed upon 
with the garments of a towering personality 
who will blaze the trail to real, not fictitious, 
national independence to be forever estab- 



18 The River Dragon's Bride 

lished in righteousness and justice, China 
will forget her inaction — her aeons of dr earn- 
ings — and all China's blue-coated millions 
will be awake. 

Our boatmen are poling us now, for the 
breeze is tired. That husky but surly one, 
the skipper's son, is staying well forward in 
■the boat's prow. With his arms akimbo he 
is solemnly whistling up the wind. This is 
no quotation. No such marks should inclose 
that last phrase. It is not a repetition of an 
old proverb, neither is it a joke. It is a fact. 
The skipper's son is seriously endeavoring, 
by making a certain noise with his mouth, 
to raise the wind. 

The task is obviously less arduous than 
that of poling which is absorbing the rest 
of the crew to the point of straining muscles 
and sweating bodies. From our prow these 
yellow, half-naked giants are casting into 
the channel their long iron-tipped poles, and 
with such a leverage they are running along 
the very rim of the boatside toward the stern 
of our little craft, which shoots forward by 
the measure of her own length upon her un- 



Where Flows the Ming 19 

willing course against the current. Still the 
surly one stands at his ease and whistles. 

It occurs to me as I watch them there in 
the gathering dusk that nautical ethics on 
Life's River seem quite like this! It's easy 
enough to whistle to raise the wind — to make 
a noise with one's mouth as it were — but 
usually it's the folk who pole who get any- 
where. 

The moon's disk is edging over the moun- 
tain. As the silver segment widens to 
emerge presently in full-orbed glory, the 
craggy summits, reaching up and up through 
the blue to catch the shining radiance, are 
mirrored in tender trembling lines upon the 
river's breast — the river, which like all other 
living vibrant creation, seems to sleep. 

The boat lies at anchor. The crew, in- 
cluding him of the noisy mouth, have be- 
stowed themselves away in an invisible some- 
where astern, to dream maybe of some de- 
lectable river where everybody whistles and 
no one poles. 

Overhead on a mountain steep of rock 
huddles pathetically in moonlight whiteness 



20 The River Dragon's Bride 

the crumbling walls of a little temple, its 
up-curving roof of tile splashed by the brush 
of passing centuries with tones of mellow 
brownness. A silence unfathomable, un- 
thinkable, is upon the face of the world. The 
mountainsides, long stripped of the trees 
which should now be clothing their nudity, 
could offer no shelter for even so much as a 
few feathered things who might disturb the 
stillness by murmuring in their dreams. I 
lay prone upon the white deck of the boat 
saturated in moonshine, drugged by that at- 
mosphere of ultimate repose into almost com- 
plete cessation of action, either physical or 
mental. I seemed an unreal atom in some 
unreal sphere. Had I been a Brahman, my 
drowsy soul would probably have whispered 
"Nirvana." 

I am glad it was no violent discordant 
crash of sound that shattered the spell ! Such 
veritable perfection of quiet must, of course, 
needs come to an end as do all perfect things. 
This silence did not end — it simply oozed 
away upon the sound of the song of boatmen, 
heard faintly at first, as it was borne to us 



Where Flows the Ming 21 

from far up the river where the moonlight 
ceased to be moonlight and became silver 
mist. It was the old, old song, intoned by 
China's people of the rivers for a thousand 
ages, as they cut with cumbersome propellers 
the spray of the much-traveled waterways 
which lead to the sea. 

More than once I have luxuriously lounged 
in a gondola under a silver moon, with the 
low strumming of a guitar in my ears, while 
snatches of song from passing boated min- 
strels lent enchantment to a summer night 
in Venice. They were beautiful, those nights, 
and I love their memory. But since my 
nights on the Ming — those perfect nights — 
the others pale as do berouged ladies to- 
ward morning after a night of dancing and 
gayety. 

This song of the boatmen on the Ming was 
no ephemeral roundelay, no bit from some 
flimsy music-hall favorite, popular for a 
passing moment. This was a song woven out 
of the fiber of which Chinese hearts have 
been made since the beginning of things 
Chinese, which is very, very long ago. No 



22 The River Dragon's Bride 

words of love or romance carried its mes- 
sage. Yet the meaningless syllables, "Hi- 
la, hai-la, Hi-la ho-la," chanted over and 
over again in that uncanny melody spoke of 
matters mysterious and profound. I sensed 
through strains of that song the story of the 
hard labor of men and women as they 
planted the rice, and convoyed it to cities 
down the river where it would sustain the 
physical life of teeming millions. There 
crooned in its cadences the love of men for 
women. There trailed through it the laugh- 
ter of children. There haunted it the ghost- 
chords of departed ancestors, whose impos- 
ing graves looked down from the mountain- 
sides, and whose spirits are more powerful 
in death than in life. There breathed 
through it a deep note of cruelty, of age-old 
custom ; of protest against the encroachment 
of Western modernism; of smoke of sacri- 
ficial incense, of shadows cast by sacred 
mountains ; of the swish of the muddy water 
of the paddy-field. All these things I heard 
that night in the song of the boatmen, now 
coming nearer and nearer through the moon- 



Where Flows the Ming 23 

light to our anchored craft. It was a man's 
song, and they sang it antiphonally, the two 
shifts of oarsmen, in high-pitched, minor 
voices, their paddles falling to the strange 
rhythm in absolute unison. They came so 
near that as I crouched on our deck I could 
see the water slip from their flashing oars 
like showers of silver beads. 

They came — they passed — and were gone, 
as millions like them, for ever and a day, had 
come down the old river, had passed and 
were gone. One lone cadence of that weirdly 
magic music to this day sings itself over and 
over within my consciousness, though my 
voice utters it not often. Here are the notes 
as they came to me across the water, but do 
not try to sing them. The strain is but the 
wraith of the song, and besides, no one could 
sing it but the boatmen on the old, old Ming, 
rowing in the moonlight down to the sea. 




Hi - la hai - la, Hi - la ho - la - 

Spring had come trailing across the moun- 
tains of southern China, just before we, dis- 



24 The River Dragon's Bride 

embarking from our house boat at that place 
in the river where riotous rapids halt the up- 
stream pilgrim, began the last lap of the trail 
at whose end beamed the benign countenance 
of Handy Andy. 

Yes, spring had come to dwell for a season 
in the Mountains of the Moon. I saw her 
that last day on the trail as we followed it on 
foot or in chairs, over the well-walked nar- 
row mountain paths toward the city of An- 
cestral Abodes. She had drawn about her 
fair young shoulders a marvelous robe of 
jade green gauze starred with ruby azaleas. 
She wore milk white plum blossoms upon her 
breast, and in her hair the feathery fronds of 
young bamboo. She was decked like an Ori- 
ental maiden for the red bridal chair. Oh, 
she was passing fair! 

But the distant mountaintops are projected 
against the glare of the departing sun in 
purple boldness as the day wanes — our final 
day on the trail. We linger for a moment 
on the crest of the last heights to be topped, 
with a tender good night in our hearts for 
the lovely world which we seemed to be leav- 



Where Flows the Ming 25 

ing behind, drowsy now, with all its spring- 
time glory upon it. 

There at our feet upon the dark side of the 
mountain we behold the trail's end, that an- 
cient city, rising like a phantom thing from a 
sea of spring green, and protected by encir- 
cling mountain sentinels stern and strong. 
Once more the chair coolies swing us upon 
their tired shoulders and the last descent be- 
gins — and ends. 

We are at the portal in the high wall 
which surrounds the Hospital of the Good 
Shepherd. A bell clangs, there are voices 
within. Then the gate swings wide, and 
there stands the American Woman Doctor 
with a welcome in her outstreched hands and 
in her radiant eyes a great gladness. And 
just behind her, with dignified gratification 
in every line of his long blue coat and his 
close-fitting black satin cap with its red 
knob, stands he whose story has occasioned 
this rambling write-up of the trail in China 
which led us to him. 




II 

A CHINESE HANDY ANDY 

HE Woman Doctor was responsible 
for his being called by the some- 
what unusual name of Handy 
Andy. I dare say this Chinese 
man, by his capable all-aroundness, had re- 
minded her, that summer when she built the 
Hospital of the Good Shepherd down in the 
fertile Lek-du valley, of his Celtic prototype. 
Already you know of the trail which led 
us to him. Now I am telling you his story 
as I had it from the Woman Doctor herself 
as we sat in the fire-glow after supper, in her 
own inglenook, a bit removed from the cen- 
ter of hospital activities. 

He was a dignified but gracious Chinese 
man, this Handy Andy. No one would ever 
indulge, when referring to him, in the usual 
terms affected by flippant foreigners when 
writing either intimately or casually of the 
26 



A Chinese Handy Andy 27 

people of far Cathay. He was a Chinese 
Man, which in his case included also being 
a scholar, a diplomat, and very certainly, a 
Christian gentleman. 

The Woman Doctor finding quite impos- 
sible for the hot summer's sojourn her first 
headquarters, consisting of a stuffy room or 
two in the abode of somebody's honorable 
ancestors, was forced to look for another base 
from w r hich to work. Furthermore, after 
much searching for cleaner — to say nothing 
of cooler — quarters, eventually the Woman 
Doctor found domicile for herself and her 
servant in the house of Handy Andy, which 
stood a lap or two up the mountainside, and 
was etched out of a background of bamboo 
groves. There flourished the buxom part- 
ner of his choice, or, to be more exact, the 
choice made for him in his callow days by 
some go-between, the matrimonial agent of 
his honorable parents. Chinese marriages 
make no claim to being shaped in heaven. 
Why should parents decide for their progeny 
the comparatively unimportant and transient 
matters of childhood, and then basely aban- 



28 The River Dragon's Bride 

don them when the most vital and significant 
question of marriage matters arises ? Plainly 
the duty of making this choice is paramount 
to that of all others — so at least reasons the 
Chinese parental mind. 

Mrs. Handy Andy, who was of rather 
high official lineage, may have with docility 
permitted herself to be chosen by her honor- 
able parents-in-law to share the domestic for- 
tunes of their son, but she never exhibited 
any particularly striking characteristics of 
tractability until long after the development 
in the life of her somewhat subdued liege 
which I am here recording. The change in 
her was solved through those circumstances 
which ultimately led her to become a Bible 
Woman. After that great thing happened, 
with the Holy Classic under her arm through 
many years did she patiently and joyously 
travel, without complainings, in torrid heat 
or sheets of rain, that the untaught women 
in those "other villages" might hear of the 
great miracle which had made her own life 
worth while. 

In the early years various joy feasts were 



A Chinese Handy Andy 29 

spread in the house on the mountainside in 
honor of certain tiny almond-eyed little 
strangers who came to insure the continuance 
for many generations to come of the lineage 
of their father. When the Woman Doctor 
took up her abode in that house the wee 
strangers had become very much at home — 
rollicking chunks of boys and girls, their 
black hair done in cunning patches and pig- 
tails, their black eyes shining with mischief, 
their blue coats and trousers going to make 
an altogether irresistible juvenile combina- 
tion. 

At some time before the coming to his 
house that summer of the Woman Doctor, 
its master had learned of the "Doctrine" to 
his own soul's entire satisfaction and his 
family's entire mystification. That their 
father was afflicted with a strange species of 
insanity was confided in whispers by the 
children to the Doctor before she had been 
under the roof for a single moon. Each day, 
they solemnly averred, he trod the steep path 
which led through the bamboo grove at the 
back of the house, not once, but several times. 



30 The River Dragon's Bride 

Infantile curiosity is not exclusively an Oc- 
cidental commodity. Behold, then, these 
small Chinese delights of their father's heart 
secretly trailing that most honorable person- 
age up the path and into the grove of 
feathery greenness which to his devout soul 
had become the oratory within whose lace- 
like walls he held communion with an unseen 
Presence. 

Not only so, but with all due impressive- 
ness was this sensational fact reported to the 
mother of the house — ad libitum ad nauseam. 
Had they not seen their most exalted father 
upon his knees there among the bamboos, 
with uplifted face and closed eyes as he talked 
aloud with some strange God, of whom, hunt 
afterward as they would, they could find not 
the faintest trace? 

The entire family, including their foreign 
guest, when upon various high occasions she 
was bidden to partake of a meal with them, 
could testify that before the master of the 
house would taste one morsel of his steaming 
bowl of rice he would bow his head, and hold 
conversation with Some One, whom none 



A Chinese Handy Andy 31 

of them, stare about the room with wide-open 
eyes as they would, could see. Afterward 
one of the servants reported to his exas- 
perated mistress, who had no sympathy 
whatever with such erratic behavior, that he 
had distinctly observed the Woman Doctor 
herself doing the same mysterious worship 
over her own rice in her own apartment. At 
what possible conclusion could the idol- 
worshiping mother and her children arrive, 
except that the Doctor was afflicted with the 
same sort of craziness as the man of that 
house, inasmuch as they both at various 
times spoke aloud to Some One whom no one 
else could see? 

During the long, hot summer days rose 
certainly if slowly the walls of the new hos- 
pital. The Woman Doctor found her hands 
more than full as she supervised the proc- 
esses of building and guarded the innumer- 
able points which invariably arise with Ori- 
ental contractors. All of these points were 
to be particularly reckoned with if the funds 
at her command, most of which she herself 
had laboriously gathered, were to cover the 



32 The River Dragon's Bride 

final cost of this first and only refuge for 
suffering women and children in all that sec- 
tion of the province. In fact, it was almost 
too much of a task for even the Woman 
Doctor. 

In spite of her watchful eye all sorts of 
things in the way of building material had 
a mysterious and most annoying fashion of 
disappearing without leaving a trace. The 
situation clearly demanded omnipresence, 
and this, with all her equipment of brain and 
body, the Woman Doctor had never been 
able to achieve. By day she was very con- 
fident, being constantly upon the ground. By 
night she was helpless, for with all her 
temerity of soul and nerve she couldn't sleep 
and at the same time keep watch over a half- 
finished hospital. 

"Where thieves break through and steal" 
is no mere figure of speech in the Orient. 
One is vastly amused at first, over there, 
upon sight of an inclosing wall with fanciful 
but flimsy ornamental border at the top done 
in plaster in a sort of embroidery design. 
But he changes his mind when he learns that 



A Chinese Handy Andy 33 

the flimsier the coping the greater the clatter 
by which some night prowler is announced 
as the plaster fancywork crashes into pieces 
against the weight of the ladder by means 
of which he tries to climb up and over "some 
other way." Verily I mused as I learned, 
after all, fancywork may have its uses ! 

The Woman Doctor had no stone adorn- 
ment atop her wall, and anyway it is doubt- 
ful whether singlehanded she could have 
managed a bandit party at 2 a. m., though 
she has a reputation on both sides of the 
Pacific for her skill with a knife. The fact is 
that while the walls of the Hospital of the 
Good Shepherd were rising the services of 
a dependable man who should act as major 
domo were absolutely essential. Having 
been a close observer of her Chinese host 
during the time of her sojourn beneath his 
roof, and of his fidelity under the trying 
conditions involved in being the Christian 
head of a non-Christian home, the Woman 
Doctor was inspired to proffer to him the 
job of overseeing hospital affairs. 

Handy Andy looked very gravely at her 



34 The River Dragon's Bride 

when she broached the subject to him, and 
then with characteristic Oriental delibera- 
tion told her he would give her an answer in 
two weeks. Fortunately, however, his de- 
cision was reached within a few days, and 
was both definite and favorable, the party 
to the second part assuring the Doctor that 
regarding her offer divine direction had been 
given him in a vision. 

In this vision, so he affirmed, he had very 
clearly seen his Master, who had said to him 
plainly, "Follow the Foreign Doctor/' And 
the Woman Doctor, rather askance at such 
a bold declaration of divine leading, was 
moved to expostulate. God never directed 
one human being to follow another, she ar- 
gued to him; it must be the Great Guide 
whom he had been directed to follow, not an 
American Woman Doctor! Had he not, 
after all, been mistaken — the ears of his soul 
been a bit dull of hearing ? But Handy Andy 
remained obdurate. It was the Foreign Doc- 
tor whom he was to follow. 

Thereafter with a great solemnity upon 
her, the Woman Doctor was more than ever 



A Chinese Handy Andy 35 

careful of her walking, remembering the 
millstone penalty of him who causes an- 
other, even a "little one," to stumble. 

So, as is not unusual in Chinese families, 
the man of the house in the bamboo grove 
betook himself to his important task, the 
mother of his children remaining with her 
flock on the mountainside. If the truth be 
told, Handy Andy was much more concerned 
for the salvation of the souls of his wife and 
children than even for his own success in his 
new managerial position, which is saying 
much. In regard to the latter, the Woman 
Doctor intimated to me that in all the forty 
thousand or more characters in the Chinese 
language there were none sufficiently strong 
to express the measure of his value to the 
hospital project. 

Eventually the little family moved down 
from the mountainside and became dwellers 
in the hospital compound. This was after 
another "vision" in which Handy Andy had. 
plainly seen his wife and his little son drown- 
ing in the depths of a deep, dark well, their 
imploring hands stretched out to him for de- 



36 The River Dragon's Bride 

liverance. The Hospital of the Good Shep- 
herd almost lost him then, because he was 
convinced that it was his plain duty to go 
back to the bamboo grove and set about vig- 
orously to bring the mother of his children, 
with all of them also, not into the compound 
of the Hospital of the Good Shepherd — that 
was not his plan — but into His fold. All this 
he got out of his vision. I myself am no 
scoffer at visions capable of such sane in- 
terpretations. 

It is not the story of the coming of his 
heart's desire for his family that I am here 
setting down, though that is a stirring narra- 
tive. This is to record that Christian conse- 
cration may be much enhanced by Christian 
diplomacy, a fact finely demonstrated in the 
planting of the much desired Sunday school 
in the City of Ancestral Abodes by that apos- 
tle of the Lord called by the Woman Doctor 
Handy Andy. 

Do not forget that this same apostle of the 
Lord was by birth of no mean origin. I tell 
you that I myself have walked through the 
mazes of his own ancestral home, where in 



A Chinese Handy Andy 37 

the old days two hundred people, all being 
of the families of his own clan, were dwellers 
— and at the same time, too. Likewise there 
were six front doors, and what better or 
more adequately than this architectural fea- 
ture could bespeak its abounding hospitality ? 
To my heart this also spoke, and it was of 
another many-mansioned house where doors 
will not sag on rusty hinges nor deserted 
halls be haunted by voices long silent. 

It was at that particular time of the year 
when all masculine China, to the extent of 
fathers and eldest sons, streams forth to the 
hillsides to do worship at the graves of de- 
parted ancestors. Also they place upon these 
graves offerings which are designed not only 
to visualize the measure of their filial devo- 
tion, but also to felicitate materially the 
spirits of the departed in their present habi- 
tat. Remote be the time when China, satu- 
rate with Western irreverence, shall forget 
this most lovely of all her ancient customs ! 

It was the time of year, I say, when the 
fathers and big boys, most imposing in their 
long silk coats, went out to the graves, 



38 The River Dragon's Bride 

and the little boys stayed at home in utter 
insignificance — and ordinary blue cotton 
coats. 

Now, it fell out that just at this time in his 
daily Bible reading Handy Andy came upon 
the first chapter of Matthew, and that par- 
ticular portion of Scripture with us not often 
thumbed because of much reading, seemed to 
glow before the eyes of this most practical 
dreamer of dreams with a great illumination. 
At chapel prayers that morning he observed 
that he noticed how the Hebrews of the 
Lord's day made .very much of the ancestry 
of their honorable houses, even as had been 
the Chinese custom for many ages. He 
could not but deplore that the younger boys 
of his own clan knew so little of its ancient 
history. 

Presently he crossed the railless foot- 
bridge which wormed its uncertain way 
across the river, and divided the town into 
two parts as distinct as ever were the three 
into which Gaul was divided, and entered 
one of those six front doors in his own an- 
cestral house within which discontented little 



A Chinese Handy Andy 39 

Chinese boys who couldn't go graveyarding 
were dragging out a dismal day. 

Sympathy was sweet to that accumulation 
of infantile misery, so Handy Andy's benign 
proposition that he assist them in having an 
ancestral celebration of their own met with 
instant response — that is, as "instant" as 
anything in the Orient can be. 

In the reception hall of "Heaven's Well," 
that three-walled apartment with the fourth 
dimension, quite open and giving upon the 
stone-flagged court, to the poetic mind of the 
Chinese the bottom of a "well," whose cover 
is the blue sky — in this room gathered with 
their guest that group of younger sons. And 
the guest, that subtle apostle of the "Doc- 
trine," his eyes flashing, his language aglow, 
recited to them out of the genealogy of their 
clan the glorious exploits of their famous 
ancestors whose tombs in the hillsides were 
the shrines of family veneration and worship. 
And if this were not enough, this august 
uncle of theirs opened before their shining 
black eyes certain ponderous books, the most 
valued possession of their clan, in which be- 



40 The River Dragon's Bride 

sides much else of glorious history, all the 
things he had related to them were written 
down. 

The first adventure into genealogical pas- 
tures was a huge success. At the most ur- 
gent entreaties of the Younger Sons it was 
repeated upon two or three occasions. The 
Y. S.'s were thrilled with importance and 
their most exalted parents highly gratified 
that into the fiber of these young sprouts on 
the family tree such valuable information 
was being infused. 

When clan enthusiasm had reached its 
peak the instructor quit ! In vain was he im- 
portuned to resume his recitals by various 
of the Younger Sons who chanced to meet 
him here and there as he looked after the 
business of the Hospital, which long since had 
become a lighthouse set in the sea of human 
suffering of that district. Later came a most 
polite and formal letter, written in Chinese 
characters upon bright red paper — quite like 
a wedding invitation — urging the self-ap- 
pointed professor of the history of his house 
to return to the eager group in the reception 



A Chinese Handy Andy 41 

hall of Heaven's Well in his own ancestral 
house, but he went not. 

It was only after a formal visitation of the 
head men of his clan, who pointed out the 
great benefit which would be conferred upon 
the rising generation of the illustrious clan 
which was his as well as theirs, that Handy 
Andy rather reluctantly consented to resume 
his labors among the Younger Sons. 

Very adroitly then did this Christian diplo- 
mat suggest to his non-Christian clansmen 
that personally he would be much advantaged 
could one certain day be set apart wherein 
he could materially assist the young grafts 
on the family tree in their growth toward the 
ideals of filial devotion and deeds heroic as 
exemplified in their ancestral annals. 

Besides these valuable facts he said he had 
it in his heart to teach them a few others. 
You will have guessed what the few "others" 
were which to this hot-hearted disciple of 
Jesus Christ mattered most, being those re- 
ferring to Him in whom "all the families of 
the earth" should be blest. Also he suggested 
that about once in seven days he could con- 



42 The River Dragon's Bride 

veniently leave the Hospital and travel across 
the rickety footbridge to the house of his 
ancestors for the purpose they urged. 

So it fell out that upon that day which 
the Christians called the Sabbath a Chinese 
ambassador of Jesus Christ became the cen- 
ter of a permanent group of boys, which, 
under his inspired guidance, merged pres- 
ently into the Sabbath school which had for 
long been the desire of his heart. 

Later the Sabbath school became a church. 

Was not I myself guided by Handy Andy 
to his ancestral home of which I have told 
you? And did not my own eyes behold the 
reception hall of Heaven's Well, which now 
on every Sabbath day is filled by a worship- 
ing congregation? 




Ill 

THE BLIGHT OF BEELZEBUB 

HE led me out of the delicate loveli- 
ness of her room where we had 
"tiffined" together up a broad stair 
and into the shaded shelter of the 
sleeping porch. There she gently urged me 
into a steamer chair with its most inviting 
lazy-looking length, while she herself sat 
upon a bamboo stool at my side and told me 
the story which I am telling you. 

"She" in this case was the wife of the 
Theological Professor in the College for 
boys. I mean by that, that "He" was a the- 
ological professor four days in the week. 
The other three both "He" and "She" were 
evangelists known and adored throughout 
all the tropical countryside through which 
they itinerated, and where almost like forest 
leaves those other villages were scattered. 
She herself had come out to south China 
43 



44 The River Dragon's Bride 

young and enthusiastic from her New Eng- 
land hills, and had had her various and sun- 
dry experiences in missionarying before she 
had added to them by taking on the Theologi- 
cal Professor. And it was of one of these 
prenuptial episodes of which she spoke to 
me on that afternoon in May. 

I can sense again the setting of her story 
now as I tell you. I can see the long ribbons 
of sunlight slanting through the slits in the 
cool green of the shutters, and falling into 
golden patterns on the matting which cov- 
ered the floor. She sat there, slight but vital, 
her soft brown eyes glowing like gentle stars 
to light a face of classical oval, haloed by an 
aura of divinely soft brown hair. If her red 
lips trembled as she talked, or smiled as some 
half-forgotten reminiscence played across 
her mind, it was only to enhance the sweet 
curve of her mouth or to reveal a fleck of 
snow-white teeth. Add to all this the flavor 
of an adorable New England accent and a 
filet lace collar and you will comprehend in- 
stantly why the Professor digressed from his 
theology far enough to fall in love, and to be 



The Blight of Beelzebub 45 

inspired to invite her to itinerate with him 
through life. 

That was a weird subject of which we 
spoke that day — nothing less than demon 
possession. I had heard strange rumors, 
miraculous tales, having to do with such 
happenings, during my wanderings up coun- 
try, and of these I had spoken. I confess that 
lying there in that lazy chair with long bars 
of sunshine slanting across me, and looking 
into the face of the charming wife of the 
Theological Professor, any subject in which 
Mephisto figured seemed remote. However, 
I had asked My Lady questions, and she of 
the dark-blue gown and filet lace collar was 
essaying to answer. 

"Demon possession," she began — and then 
the story ran on even as I shall tell you. 

She had come to China, as she told me, 
young and eager, and imbued with a very 
broad "Congregational" belief. This variety 
of belief, she went on to elucidate, had no 
time nor room for the recognition of a power- 
ful personality who is the author of all evil, 
and is continually playing upon its forces to 



46 The River Dragon's Bride 

the great discomfiture of the human race. 
In short, to her New England mind the devil 
was not. What other folk thought him to be 
was simply a lack of positive good — a hole 
in the bottom of the boat, as it were. But 
there came a day upon which her mind was 
to register a change. 

The adventure overtook her when, in the 
third year of her missionarying in China, 
she and her little Bible Woman were taking 
their way through some of those villages 
which were scattered along the river a day 
or two from the mission center. 

My Lady had been experiencing that ex- 
altation of soul which occasionally obsesses 
the toiler who beholds with radiant eyes the 
fruit hanging luscious upon the boughs of 
his endeavor. And why not ? At every mud 
village to which she sampanned she had been 
received by enthusiastic women who jostled 
each other in their eagerness to welcome her. 
"Bing-ang" (Peace to you!) they had sylla- 
bled in ascending scale and repeatedly upon 
her approach — "Bing-ang! Bing-ang!" And 
sadly they had murmured, "Please, slowly, 



The Blight of Beelzebub 47 

slowly walk," when, the teaching of the Jesus 
Doctrine ended, My Lady was clambering 
again into her boat. She had drunk tea and 
nibbled watermelon seeds w 7 ith gracious 
gentle women in houses where idol shelves 
were now a matter of history, and whose 
little children no longer wore hung about 
their necks contrivances in which their souls 
were safely locked, nor jingling bells about 
their baby ankles to scare away the ever- 
active demons. "The Kingdom is coming!" 
My Lady had no doubt of the fact, and there 
even lurked in the back of her mind the com- 
fortable conviction that she was helping to 
bring it. 

And then the thing happened which, ac- 
cording to My Lady, completely shifted her 
mental gears in regard to a devil who was a 
real person, and led her to recognize that 
evil was by no means merely a lack of good. 
In fact, over night she sw y ung clean over into 
the camp of those who assert that "The 
Prince of this world" is an honest-to-good- 
ness entity w r ho exercises a malignant, ma- 
levolent, active force for evil ; who grips real 



48 The River Dragon's Bride 

people, and ruins them, and in some cases 
tortures them and drives them mad. 

For several days in a large village My 
Lady and her Bible women had taught the 
women and visited them in their houses. All 
was going well and it was with peculiar satis- 
faction of spirit that she dropped in, one 
evening toward the end of her stay, for a 
call upon a family whose every member had 
seemed frankly interested in her disclosures 
of a better way than idol worship, and genu- 
inely determined 'to abandon the old way of 
many gods. Very often she had been a 
guest in that house, being always eagerly 
welcomed. Very slowly and plainly and 
very simply had she taught them the funda- 
mental mysteries of the Doctrine, and on this 
her last visit to them before her journey 
down the river, the whole family had de- 
clared their intention of becoming people of 
the Jesus Way. 

Because of this the heart of My Lady beat 
so joyously that she could scarcely maintain 
with dignity her proper New England de- 
corum. For, remember, this family was 



The Blight of Beelzebub 49 

outstanding in the community, and its con- 
version would mean everything to the Cause. 
Yet My Lady was cautious ; she must be very 
sure of her course. She questioned them 
closely as to their definitely announced in- 
tent, and over its avowal they prayed and 
sang. The Chinese believe very devoutly in 
the power of song. And to all her queries, 
there was always the bold answer — "Yes, we 
wish to be Christians." 

Then the missionary, in order to superin- 
tend the destruction of the last bridge which 
might lead from the new faith back to the 
old, applying the supreme test — the thumb 
screws, as it were — to their newly found 
purpose, demanded that the consent of each 
member of the household be given to the 
burning of the household gods. Without 
parley or reserve, individually and collec- 
tively, permission was given. There was no 
hesitation, no drawing back. "But the Kit- 
chen God," further argued My Lady, "will 
you allow me to take even that down, and 
with my own hands?" 

Now the Kitchen God, it would seem, is 



50 The River Dragon's Bride 

the last word — the very ultimate — to the 
Chinese mind in its influence upon the Over 
Powers, who are alike dispensers of good and 
evil rewards for deeds done in the Chinese 
body. Upon New Year occasions — the 
twenty-fourth of the New Year month, to 
be exact — before that piece of red paper 
representing the kitchen deity, which is 
pasted upon the wall over the stove, for a 
half day, and by the entire family, worship 
is offered. Below it smokes the fragrant 
incense, and delicacies in porcelain bowls are 
conveniently placed for his delectation. 
Treacle and honey among the offerings are 
sweet suggestions that the mouth of the god 
be closed to the utterance of bitter reports 
against the family. Is not the kitchen, after 
all, the heart of the house, and would not the 
ears of its presiding deity be open to all of 
those hidden family intimacies which should 
remain unknown to the public — and, if pos- 
sible, to the dreaded Over Powers of the 
spirit world? 

So in order to insure a complimentary re- 
port by the Kitchen God, when at the New 



The Blight of Beelzebub 51 

Year he sojourns for ten days in the abode 
of the shades, his mouth is smeared with 
honey, and he is conducted into the spirit 
realm upon the smoke of his own burning. 
In ten days another Kitchen God is pasted 
upon the wall and the new record begins. 

This being the god most to be feared and 
of all the gods the one to whom the Chinese 
domestic group most tenaciously holds, it 
took much boldness upon the part of My 
Lady to follow up the declared purpose of 
her prospective converts by suggesting that 
she herself remove from the wall with her 
own hands the scrap of paper which repre- 
sented him. 

But each time she repeated her query came 
the united response ready and hearty: "We 
do believe ! Yes, you yourself may take down 
the Kitchen God!" 

So in the end My Lady went into the 
kitchen, followed by the family, pulled out a 
stool, climbed upon it, and with fingers which 
trembled with eagerness began peeling off 
the red paper which represented the tale- 
bearing god. 



52 The River Dragon's Bride 

Scarcely, however, had the first edge been 
loosened when out from that corner of the 
kitchen where stood the little mother, sub- 
dued and meek, My Lady told me she heard 
a tiny noise — a sort of a squeak of protest 
which almost paralyzed her fingers, sending 
a shivering and a trembling through her very 
bones. It seemed veritably as though she 
were gripped by some evil power quite out- 
side herself, and she was almost too horrified 
to speak — was like to have fallen off the 
stool. But presently recovering her mental 
poise, and her blood having somewhat 
thawed in her veins, she turned herself to- 
ward that corner of the room from which 
the uncanny sound had come, and looking 
at the gentle little mother who stood there 
said somewhat severely, "Oh, then you do 
not wish me to take it down — you are un- 
willing ?" 

But the woman in the corner, who un- 
doubtedly had uttered the cry, answered 
bravely, though her voice was low, "Yes, I 
am willing," and her husband and his 
mother, and even the children, joined in a 



The Blight of Beelzebub 53 

most earnest response saying, "Oh, yes, we 
all very much wish you to take it down." 

So down it came, My Lady told me, 
though not with ease, because of her strange 
consciousness that somewhere resistance to 
the process was being registered. And after- 
ward prayer was offered and a hymn sung, 
and with ecstasy in her heart and her first 
real trophy of service in China, the Kitchen 
God, in her hand, she left the hospitable home 
of her gracious gentle converts. They had a 
joyful evening, My Lady and her Bible 
Woman. They prayed for every member of 
that newly converted family and they 
thanked God for them, and afterward those 
two went joyfully to bed. 

It should have been a day sooner that the 
sampan carried them down the river. But 
vital issues hung balanced in those hours 
by which they had delayed their going, and 
no shadow of regret that they had not made 
schedule lurked in the minds of My Lady and 
her helper. Souls were what they sought— 
and had joyously found. 

And now before they were carried away 



54 The River Dragon's Bride 

on the river's tide, for no one could tell how 
long, the good-by visit to the new recruits 
to the ranks of the doers of the Doctrine must 
be made. With eyes glowing and her ex- 
altation of soul seeping through to illuminate 
her fair young face, My Lady entered the 
house whose doors had always at her touch 
swung wide with welcome. On into the room 
she fared, where more than once she had 
bowed with the family in prayer, joyously 
expectant of the greeting which would mean 
more this morning than it ever had before, 
because it would be the mutual greeting of 
Christians. 

She had barely stepped over the high 
threshold — I am telling you just as she told 
me — when it seemed to her as though an icy 
breath from a mysterious somewhere blew 
across her face. 

Before her in the room where many times 
she had been an honored guest were the same 
members of the family who, upon her de- 
parture only the night before, had accom- 
panied her to the very gate in their outer 
wall and begged her to "walk slowly." It 



The Blight of Beelzebub 55 

was certainly a blighting frost which lay 
upon the occupants of that room. The head 
of the house, at his bench, a scowl upon his 
face, did not so much as raise his head from 
his work. The old grandmother and the 
two adorable round-faced kiddies, who had 
eagerly, almost lovingly crowded up close to 
her yesterday, kept their places in the far 
corner of the room, silent and sullen. 

But it was the gentle, mild little mother 
who centered the tragic picture now un- 
rolling itself before the wondering, fright- 
ened eyes of My Lady. It was she who at 
the first loosening of an edge, in the process 
of removal of that thing on the wall which 
represented a much-to-be-feared deity, had 
involuntarily emitted a low cry of protest. 
Now she sat upon a stool in the middle of the 
floor, with such a look of savage hatred upon 
her face as, My Lady assured me, she could 
never even have dreamed as being possible 
to overspread a human countenance. 

With what courage the missionary visitor 
could summon to bolster her she spoke to 
them, greeting them in the old way, and 



56 The River Dragon's Bride 

wording her wish that with them all was 
well. 

And then, while that terrified New Eng- 
land girl grasped the brown wall for physical 
support, that little Chinese woman, her pan 
of vegetables in process of paring in her lap, 
responded to her question with such a tirade 
of vituperation as she never could have im- 
agined it possible for a human being to syl- 
lable. On and on ran the harangue, the 
vileness of its obscenity seeming to penetrate 
every corner and crevice of the room. Oc- 
casionally, out of pure physical exhaustion, 
her very breath would fail, and turning her 
face more fully upon My Lady she would 
literally froth at the mouth. Again and again 
this uncanny orgy of verbal abuse was re- 
peated, each succeeding torrent more violent 
than the one before. 

Out of all the flood of incoherent Chinese 
ravings that was poured into her ears My 
Lady patched together the gist. Had the 
woman's recital been continuous, or even 
calm, it might have framed itself into a brief 
but tragic statement. 



The Blight of Beelzebub 57 

Great peace had brooded over the house 
of the New Christians, when, their mission- 
ary visitor having departed the evening be- 
fore, they had betaken themselves to rest. 
If any member of the family was apprehen- 
sive because of the empty idol shelf, or the 
downfall of the Kitchen God, no mention was 
made of the fact. But the dreams of the mild 
little mother, who had fallen asleep along 
with the rest of the household, came to a 
sudden and direful end toward midnight, by 
the sudden entrance through her door of the 
arch enemy of the race, Satan himself. She 
saw his horrid figure, his frightful eyes. 
With awful voice and terrible malignity he 
accused her of having given her consent for 
the Foreign Woman to tear down from her 
wall his own image and superscription. He 
raised a frightful lash like a thousand scor- 
pions and laid it in cuts of burning fire upon 
her helpless body. In vain she had prayed 
the little prayer which, she had gathered 
from My Lady, would be a magic talisman 
in time of trouble — "Lord Jesus, save me." 
Though her startled eyes peered eagerly into 



58 The River Dragon's Bride 

the dark for his appearance, he came not. 
Every repetition of that prayer brought 
down upon her at the hands of her demon 
visitor new and awful torture. 

Also he flayed her with w r ords, every one 
of which seemed to sink into her flesh like a 
knife. "What do you mean/' he hissed, "by 
renouncing me — me s whom you and your 
fathers before you have served, since time 
for you was? Have not I — / — put rice in 
your bowl, and clothes on your back? And 
now you and your household desert me — re- 
nounce me — me — for the God of the Foreign 
Woman ? Come with me to hell !" 

He reached out a clawlike hand to grasp 
her, his unspeakable eyes burning her 
through like coals of fire — and then the 
dawn broke, and she was alone. 

"But," she shrieked like a mad woman, as 
My Lady, who had gone faint and white 
there against the wall, made as though to 
urge her well nigh petrified body out the 
door — "but I'll go with him to hell ! I want 
to go — I want to, I tell you !" And as if to 
clinch her own statement with another 



The Blight of Beelzebub 59 

reason, she shot forth a final addendum — 
"There are more folks there anyway!" 

"And so," I murmured, as My Lady 
ceased — "and so — ?" 

"And so," she said, "I went away and left 
them, my joy turned to ashes. There was not 
enough left of me to even speak when I found 
myself outside the wall. But this I knew, in 
spite of my New England theology, that 
whatever it was that woman saw and heard 
— explain it as you may — it was an active, 
powerful Force of Evil, which in her case 
conquered. You may call it what you will. 
/ called it the devil" 




IV 

A HOUSE OF UNDERSTANDING 

HEY were going home, those two, 
from a sojourn of ten days in the 
Women's Hospital. 'Those two" 
were daughters of Cathay, young- 
ish and by no means unattractive, even as we 
Occidentals measure good looks. "Home" 
to them meant a village three days away, in 
the furthermost mountain they could see in 
the range beyond, over whose fair contour, 
even as their journey began, night was 
already draping soft shadows of mauve and 
purple. 

Not unfrequently as they followed the nar- 
row paths between the paddy fields — those 
ascending paths paved with sharp little 
stones whose edges often were turned bellig- 
erently upward — did the returning patients 
from the Hospital pause an instant to look 
back upon the gray building from which they 
had emerged within the hour. Across its 
60 



A House of Understanding 6i 

friendly walls the declining sun was slanting 
a glorious shaft of crimson color like a bene- 
diction at evening time. 

It is small wonder that now and again the 
eyes of the two mountain climbers were 
turned wistfully back, until the hospital sil- 
houette had itself become a part of the denser 
shadows, which having completely blacked 
out the noisy city upon whose border stood 
the House of Healing, had crept with sinister 
surety upon it also. For a House of Healing 
it had been indeed to them, two neighbors, 
coming down from that village which lay 
three days away in the heart of the purple 
heights. Upon the slender thread of a 
passing rumor that the Foreign Doctor in the 
hospital down in the valley, by some strange 
power of necromancy, could clothe ailing 
women with health as with a garment they 
had essayed their great adventure. And all 
they had heard — and more — the Doctor had 
done for them, though not by magic, as 
eventually they were to know. 

What was of far more moment to the Two 
Pilgrims from the mountains in search of 



62 The River Dragon's Bride 

health, the House of Healing had become to 
them the House of Understanding, and it 
was of this more than of the other about 
which both women were thinking as night 
dropped a dark curtain between them and 
the valley below, where there stood a Chris- 
tian hospital for non-Christian women. 

Very readily had their not overly serious 
disorders yielded to the skillful ministrations 
of the Foreign Doctor. Ten short days had 
sufficed to make scientific corrections in 
physical conditions which without such treat- 
ment must easily have tied the patients to the 
questionable comfort of their hard board 
beds for the rest of their lives. However 
that may have been, of far greater signifi- 
cance were the mental operations performed, 
the spiritual correction established in the case 
of the mountain patients in that House of 
Understanding. So it was not the former 
but the latter phase of their ten days' ex- 
perience in the Hospital which upon their 
homeward way filled the minds of the return- 
ing travelers, and likewise moved their 
tongues to speech. 



A House of Understanding 63 

Bo-ai spoke first. Bo-ai's mother had 
given her that lovely name — whose meaning 
in American is Precious Love — because she 
alone of three little daughters whom the in- 
considerate gods had permitted to invade the 
family circle had been permitted by the sooth- 
sayers to remain in her arms. She had loved 
all her tiny baby girls, that Chinese mother, 
who long since had been gathered to her an- 
cestors, and whose red-lacquered coffin had 
been received into the cavernous depths of 
the great horseshoe tomb of her family on 
the mountainside. She being a woman had 
certainly loved her girl children, but tradi- 
tion and custom and the sentence of the 
soothsayer must not be gainsaid — and there 
was no denying the expensiveness of girls. 

It was Bo-ai who, between hard-taken 
breaths, because the mountain-path was so 
steep, remarked convincingly to Chieng-ging, 
her comrade on the upgrade trail, that "cer- 
tainly and beyond all peradventure, the For- 
eign Doctor exceeded all other humans in 
knowledge as well as skill." This seemed to 
her passing strange, when one considered 



64 The River Dragon's Bride 

that the Foreign Doctor was a woman. Even 
the children in the street could repeat the 
age-old proverb current among them all — 
"A learned man buildeth the walls of a city, 
but a learned woman teareth them down." 
Yet there was a woman down on the plain 
there who had reared the walls of a House of 
Healing which was also a House of Under- 
standing, because into it entered women, 
even Chinese women like themselves, to be- 
come thinking beings like herself. 

"Also," Chieng-ging replied, when because 
of the stubborn upness of the trail the two 
had sat down to rest, leaning against a great 
bowlder over which wide-eyed briar roses 
clambered, "Also, the touch of the Foreign 
Doctor's hand, even when its touch was pain, 
was past all one's thinking most gentle." 

Chieng-ging would have much reason to 
remember a soft touch. The hand of her 
mother-in-law, who instead of herself ruled 
her house and her family, had been heavy 
upon her since that day in her young maiden- 
hood, when in her red bridal chair she had 
been brought home to her husband's ances- 



A House of Understanding 65 

tral abode. "Thousand Gold" was her name, 
done into American, but that was no indica- 
tion that in her own home her value was so 
measured. She was quite unworthy of regard 
or dignity of station, inasmuch as she was 
but the mother of daughters. 

Even when late in the night the two travel- 
ers sat apart in a quiet corner of the inn 
where, because of the darkness and the dan- 
gers of the narrow path, shelter until dawn 
had been secured, their conversation was 
mostly of their great adventure and all which 
clung to the memory of it. Besides the Doc- 
tor, and mostly they spoke of the never-ceas- 
ing wonder of her, they talked of the gentle 
nurses, Chinese women, young, as they them- 
selves had been only a few years back. Car- 
ing for the sick is neither a very high nor 
even a very honorable calling in some places 
in the world, and surprise that this task had 
been raised to one of real merit and even 
distinction was still very much in their minds. 

The very servants, so their talk ran on, 
who prepared the vegetables and did the 
humble tasks of the compound were very 



66 The River Dragon's Bride 

much of a quiet, peaceable sort of folk. 
Never once during the stay of the two friends 
had either of them witnessed or even heard 
of a brawl among them. An almost unbe- 
lievable thing did this seem to them, being 
accustomed as they were to the vocal on- 
slaughts, so much a factor in the general pro- 
gram of Chinese community and domestic 
matters. 

In foreign lands where mission enterprises 
function there are inevitably a number, 
greater or less, of wee folks. In the wards 
and on the wide verandahs of the Hospital 
of the Good Shepherd happy children might 
always be seen playing among themselves, 
or with their amahs. The amahs never 
scolded or shrieked at the wee bodies, and 
the latter, although almond-eyed and olive- 
skinned like their own babies, seemed some- 
how of a different world. Possibly they were 
better babies because of better beginnings — 
anyway they were different. 

But outside of the Foreign Doctor herself 
nothing which the two mountain patients had 
observed in the hospital realm had impressed 




v h .' r \ 

.J i H: V- 




^:iL 



A House of Understanding 67 

them quite as amazingly as the Chinese 
women within it who could read ! Concern- 
ing this point there were no limits to their en- 
thusiasm. When one reflects that out of 
every one hundred of China's rank and file 
five only can decipher the printed character, 
it is not strange that Bo-ai and Chieng-ging 
were struck with amazement that every 
woman in the Foreign Doctor's hospital 
could read, from that most Exalted One her- 
self down to the youngest serving maid. 
Indeed, the two Bible women, who day after 
day sat in the outer room where patients 
waited, and there read to them out of the 
Holy Classic, were no more adept at leafing 
its sacred pages than were the nurses, and 
even the older children. 

For the three days of the journey back to 
the village in the top of the highest mountain 
did very much conversation take place upon 
all these points. And when invariably at 
intervals there was raised* the inquiry as to 
the reason for all these things so much to be 
desired by any woman, always the explana- 
tion mutually agreed upon was the same. It 



68 The River Dragon's Bride 

was that those other women-, like themselves, 
and yet so very unlike, were Persons of the 
Doctrine — Christians. 

The men of their houses offered no ob- 
jection when, as is the custom in China, 
their dutiful wives first craved their permis- 
sion to discard the worship of the household 
gods, and of those other hideous ones down 
in the temple, and become followers of that 
Jesus Christ of whom so lately they had 
learned. The men had very properly in- 
quired what ''being a Christian'' included, 
and very simply the two women told them 
that which in ten days they had absorbed 
of the new Doctrine. The gist of their in- 
formation to the men was that the content of 
the Doctrine was like to express itself in 
quiet voices speaking gentle words, and in 
hands which delighted in tender ministra- 
tions. This they told them. 

Also they begged permission to go one day 
in the week a day's journey down the other 
side of their own mountain where, according 
to the word of the Foreign Doctor, a Person 
of the Way would speak words concerning 



A House of Understanding 69 

the Doctrine. This day, which was regu- 
larly set apart by Christians for worship and 
which was called the Sabbath, would fall 
upon the third day after their return from 
the Hospital, for very carefully had they kept 
this fact in their minds. Upon their solemn 
word that not one small item of their house- 
keeping responsibilities should be omitted on 
that day — very certainly also that ample pro- 
vision should be made in the way of supplies 
of toothsome food of the variety which lies 
close to men's ribs — the heads of those two 
houses gave their consent for the church- 
going venture of their wives. 

Even before the sun had risen high enough 
to scatter its showers of gold over the bam- 
boo fronds or kiss the dew from the sleepy 
eyelids of the flowers which starred the 
mountainside, Bo-ai and Chieng-ging were 
upon their way. This was to be a day to 
them of spiritual outreach and their eager 
faces and their shining eyes proclaimed to 
every passing wayfarer on the mountain 
paths that they were bound upon some happy 
and wholly unusual errand. 



jo The River Dragon's Bride 

Very great satisfaction and very sweet 
content glowed upon the faces of the two 
friends when, for all their long faring, with 
not the tiniest fleck of dust visible upon their 
blue coats and wearing against the glossy 
blackness of their hair a few waxen petals of 
the plum blossom, they reached at last their 
objective, a tiny church in the valley. 

They entered with timid, noiseless steps, 
uncertain of what might be expected of 
women like themselves, as yet not at all sure 
of the ways of Persons of the Doctrine in 
such a case. 

In far away little churches like this one, 
hidden in some valley of southern China, 
there is announced properly enough an hour 
at which worship begins. The blue coated 
congregation, however, made up of folks 
who, like Bo-ai and Chieng-ging, must come 
from long distances, and upon their own feet 
at that, do not always arrive upon the tick 
of the clock, though in China even the clock 
does not seem to hurry. Because of these 
things, then, there is nothing arbitrary about 
the hour of beginning the worship. That be- 



A House of Understanding 71 

gins when the congregation gathers, and 
upon this day its assembling was unusually 
delayed. 

The service ended at last, and the two new 
seekers after truth had again taken the trail 
toward the heights where their village 
perched. It was hard going, the journey 
back, for always the path wound upward. 
The shadows too slanted long across the val- 
ley, and the wind, now that the sun's fires 
had dwindled, blew chill across their faces. 

In spite of the fact that black night would 
envelop them long before they could reach 
their own doors, and that at the very thought 
of the certain anger of their men their knees, 
wearied to pain- with the climbing, trembled 
under them, they clasped hands in the dark- 
ness and agreed that the day had been worth 
all it would cost. They had learned more 
fully of the Doctrine, and the sinews of their 
spirits were strengthened, as after days were 
to prove. 

It was over after a little, the cruel fury of 
their men because of their late home-coming. 
Even the marks which this fury had laid 



J2 The River Dragon's Bride 

across their backs eventually faded. But 
the words concerning the Doctrine which 
they had heard that Sabbath day in the val- 
ley church — they did not fade. 

If men could decree that women could not 
be Christians when being such involved go- 
ing to church one day in seven, then women 
could decide that as for them they would be 
Christians without going to church. 

Also after much thinking, and between 
them talking it all over, and withal with the 
full knowledge of how little fitted they were 
to undertake so great a project, the two new 
followers of the Doctrine concluded that they 
themselves must establish a church. 

So sometimes does the Spirit of all truth 
lead trusting and sincere souls into the way 
of a great adventure for God. 



V 




THE SIGN OF THE CROSS 

O-AI and Chieng-ging never forgot 
for one small moment that their 
sole theological and religious back- 
ground consisted of what they had 
learned in a stay of ten days in a Christian 
Hospital for Women, and one service in a 
little church in the valley. Also they knew 
that the portion of the Doctrine which had 
trickled through their ignorance and per- 
manently remained in their memories must 
perforce furnish forth all the spiritual pabu- 
lum with which such new followers as might 
join them could be provided. Neither of the 
women could read and there was no base of 
supplies, spiritual or intellectual, upon which, 
when their very limited store of knowledge 
was exhausted, they might draw for fresh 
material. 

In fact, the whole course in Christian 

73 



74 The River Dragon's Bride 

homiletics offered, when in due time this 
branch of the one universal Church of God 
became operative in a far off mountain in 
China, consisted of exactly three things. 
These were : the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's 
Prayer, and that Star-Spangled Banner of 
Missions, "J esus loves me, this I know." 
But the greatest asset of all in the planting 
of the new enterprise was that down in the 
Hospital, Bo-ai and Chieng-ging had them- 
selves learned to pray. Truly this was great- 
est of all. 

Now, you must not be forgetting that the 
training of the two women in the useful art 
of establishing churches had covered just ten 
days. Also you must have imagined that 
the hindrances standing ready to block the 
new project were many and serious. One 
was disposed of when a neighbor woman, 
though inspired with nothing more than 
sheerest curiosity, offered a room in her more 
ample house for the meeting place of the ex- 
pected congregation. 

The question as to the size of the congre- 
gation was settled when at the initial service, 



The Sign of the Cross 75 

called with much trepidation, the upper room 
was quite filled to capacity with women and 
children. 

Possibly, however, of all the problems to 
be solved that of thinking through some plan 
by which with unquestionable accuracy the 
Sabbath day might be marked was most 
stubbornly difficult. That this must be set 
apart as holy unto the Lord for reverent 
meditation and attendance at worship if one's 
men didn't mind — all this the founders of 
the new church were sure. But how to tell 
just which out of all the long procession of 
dull, monotonous days which dawned upon 
their village and dragged through it and 
died, was to be halted and appropriated as 
the Sabbath — this they did not know. The 
moons they numbered, but unless it was 
marked down in the book of their history or 
tradition no day was noted. Certainly the 
foreign custom of observing one day in seven 
for ceasing work and "doing" the Doctrine 
was most difficult to follow when there was 
no way of knowing which particular day it 
should be. 



j6 The River Dragon's Bride 

I know in China a certain devout old per- 
son of the Doctrine who, being too far upon 
life's way to permit his memory to keep up 
with him, never can think to close his shop 
until he sees the missionary go past his door 
on her way to Sabbath school. Then always 
he hobbles forth and puts up his shutters and 
hangs upon a nail driven into one of them 
a sign in Chinese that would be in the Amer- 
ican equivalent of "Closed because this is 
the Lord's Day." So does this old person 
of the Doctrine announce his Christian 
standing. 

But through the mountain village where 
lived Bo-ai and Chieng-ging no missionary 
had ever treked on her way, thereby indicat- 
ing to two anxious women that the divinely 
appointed day for worship had come. But 
think out the trying puzzle they must — and 
they did. 

At first it was suggested by Bo-ai that 
there be adopted a system of straight marks, 
drawn carefully with the writing brush upon 
the wall of the upper room, the place of wor- 
ship — one for each common day, the seventh 



The Sign of the Cross jj 

for the Sabbath. Later this plan was sadly 
rejected. All straight marks look much the 
same, and in such a maze of marks as were 
like to be drawn accuracy as to the day to 
be especially set apart would not be possible. 
Women, too, are so stupid — so slow of 
memory ! 

Most tangles, give them time enough, will 
eventually untangle of themselves. Chieng- 
ging it was to whom was vouchsafed the in- 
spiration. It was she who remembered with 
fresh vividness what she had learned from 
the Foreign Doctor of that holy Jesus God, 
who being himself sinless had most unjustly 
been stretched upon a cross for the sins of 
others, her own included. So it was she who 
suggested — timidly, because she was not sure 
that it was reverent — that his day be marked 
with the symbol of his suffering, the cross. 

Eventually it fell out that in the ecclesias- 
tical fresco which was begun upon the wall 
of the upper room on that day when this em- 
bryo church first functioned the basic motif 
was a cross. 

Just how long afterward I do not know, 



78 The River Dragon's Bride 

but of a certainty it was several years, that 
a Chinese pastor shepherding a flock of 
Christians well established in the Way in a 
city far across a distant valley, felt within his 
heart a strange yearning toward "those other 
sheep" wandering in spiritual darkness in the 
purple mountains whose shadowy outlines 
were becoming to him a daily challenge. 
Eventually he became unable to resist the 
call of those helpless human things, intrud- 
ing as it did upon his sensibilities like the 
bleating of lost lambs. Ultimately the Chi- 
nese pastor took his way to the mountains 
far away across his own valley, consumed 
with his determined intent to lead those 
"other sheep" into the safe fold of Divine 
Love. 

The journey was a matter of several days, 
but every step of the way his heart beat with 
a great exultation because of the glory of his 
mission. If he was footsore when at last he 
had scaled the heights and at the end of the 
last long day had rested in a mountain inn, so 
also was he glad, for now his real shepherd- 
ing might begin. 






X 



THE METHODIST E 

.This Is the JJLni churchy 

M«tkoiul titiSlCNARY SOCIETY 




THE OLDEST METHODIST CHURCH IN 
ASIA, AT FOOCHOW 



The Sign of the Cross 79 

But though the raucous noises of the vil- 
lage streets had given way to the muffled 
murmur of family noises behind shuttered lit- 
tle shops or brown mud walls, still always at 
the Chinese mountain inn will be gathered the 
curious crowd of men, whose very isolation 
urges them toward that center of possible 
outside communication. It was to such a 
group respectfully, though eagerly, gathered 
around the pastor from the distant valley, 
and in the dingy half dark of the inn, that 
he spoke of the mission which had drawn him 
to those heights. 

Very intently, very politely did the moun- 
tain men hear him through. If occasionally 
in the lantern's dim glare a significant look 
passed from eye to eye about the circle, no 
one spoke. Not until the guest had fully 
spoken many words concerning the Doctrine 
and his hot-hearted hope that soon there 
might be Christians among them, was the 
silence broken. 

It was after the pastor had altogether 
ceased that at last out of that deep silence 
which lay upon them there spoke a voice. 



8o The River Dragon's Bride 

It was an old voice, coming from one man 
in the gathered group to whom the years 
clung heavily. His were quiet words, but 
clear and compelling, and what he said was: 

"There are Christians in these mountains. 
The place of their dwelling is the next vil- 
lage." 

My pen does not know how to write down 
for you here the measure of the great amaze- 
ment of the guest from the plain. Naturally, 
having long known of the purple mountains, 
unoccupied by evangelist, unvisited by mis- 
sionary, it was with great difficulty that he 
was convinced that the sole purpose of his 
visit had already mysteriously become an 
achievement. Even when, at the conclusion 
of the brief sentence voiced by the old man, 
a murmur of assent ran through the group, 
the shepherd of the flock in the valley found 
believing it a difficult business. Could it be 
possible that preceding his own coming, in- 
spired by such a lofty ambition as was his, 
had come another whose mission had been 
identical with his own? 

One need not remain in doubt when indis- 



The Sign of the Cross 8r 

putable proof is said to be near at hand. Al- 
though all the mountain was enwrapped in 
the soft blackness of a southern night, and 
few in China then venture out over the nar- 
row paths set with sharp-edged stones, 
which rim sheer and frightful precipices, 
there presently emerged from the inn a blue- 
coated procession of men led by one very old, 
whose unsteady hand held a lantern. It was 
a distance through the dark to the next vil- 
lage a full six li, but the spirit of the visitor 
to whom had just been given such astound- 
ing information could brook no delay, which 
if he wait until morning, must span the re- 
mainder of the night. 

Because then of the urgency of the guest 
and also because of their own certainty, the 
mountain men trod the path through the 
dark, to find themselves after a while slip- 
ping noiselessly through the one street of 
the village of their quest. Before a house a 
bit ampler and somewhat better than the 
others which faced the street, huddling to- 
gether in close friendliness, the old man with 
the lantern came to a halt. 



82 The River Dragon's Bride 

There was a sharp rap at the outer door — 
a few words of greeting in the darkness. 
Then the silent little procession passed 
within, and moved slowly up the stairs. A 
door swung into a block of open space, 
carved out by the lantern's glare into the 
proportions of a room. 

If anywhere in all the world one special 
yet perfectly ordinary spot can be trans- 
formed into a spiritual "upper room" be- 
cause to that sanctum once in seven days 
there comes Jesus Christ to commune with 
his friends, then this room, revealed by the 
lantern glow in all its pitiful bareness, was 
surely such an one. 

Eagerly, almost violently, did the pastor 
from the valley, standing there within the 
shimmering aura of the dim light, grasp the 
lantern from the hand of the old man who 
carried it. He held it high above his head 
as, peering sharply through the half light, he 
passed quickly around the four walls of the 
room. Upon these four walls he beheld an 
ecclesiastical fresco which, a matter of years 
before, was begun by two humble women — 



The Sign of the Cross 83 

disciples, however, of our Lord, whom they 
had met to their soul's satisfaction during a 
stay of ten days in a Christian Hospital for 
Chinese Women. 

What the pastor from the plain below saw 
was a row of marks three deep, etched 
crudely out upon the four walls of that "up- 
per room" — and every seventh mark was a 
cross. 

And there were Christians in those moun- 
tains. 




VI 

THE LOOSENED GRIP 

UT," I began, "you simply must 
tell me another devil story — one 
with a different sort of ending, you 
know." 

It was in the sun parlor at the Theological 
Professor's house again, and I was lazying 
in the steamer chair. 

"I simply can't write that story down, 
Lady Dear, and leave the folks who read it 
with such a taste, so to speak, in their men- 
tal mouths. I mean, isn't there another 
story where we — that is, the woman, instead 
of the devil — wins out? I'm sure there is 
one!" 

And so she told me — though really it was 
her little Bible Woman's adventure, and it 
happened just as I shall be writing it down 
for you. 

Siok-leng — which being interpreted means 

8 4 



The Loosened Grip 85 

"Pure White Lily" — was the name of the 
Bible Woman. Indeed she seemed quite the 
embodiment of her name too, as she moved 
about through the filthy mazes of the river 
villages. Like a lily of spotless whiteness 
she seemed among the other women, in these 
places of odor and squalor and unsightly, 
hidden things her very spiritual reach lifting 
her out and beyond them. In a vague, won- 
dering way the village women knew this — 
though had you asked them the why of their 
almost subconscious perception about Siok- 
leng's superiority, they could not have told 
you. 

A little way into this world of better things 
she had inducted some of them when once or 
twice a year she sampanned down the river 
and sojourned for a space within those fetid, 
crowded, nauseous places. It was while 
upon such an annual or semiannual errand 
that there happened the adventure of which 
I am telling you. 

A boy who might have turned fifteen had 
politely approached Siok-leng as she was re- 
placing her Bible and hymn book in the silk 



86 The River Dragon's Bride 

bag which her own fingers had lovingly em- 
broidered as befitted the reliquary of such 
holy things. The women to whom just a 
moment before she had been talking had dis- 
persed like a flock of noisily chattering crows, 
and the little Bible Woman had fetched a 
long sigh of relief for very tiredness. 

The lad, immaculate in his clean blue 
gown, his hair sleekily glistening like the 
polished black wood of his own hills, had 
most punctiliously made his politeness and 
gravely inquired if the honorable guest from 
up the river were, as he had heard reported, 
a Person of the Jesus Doctrine ? 

There may be persons so designated in the 
world who hesitate to boldly make the ac- 
knowledgment, but not to this division of the 
faint-of-heart belonged Siok-leng. It was 
because of the unhesitating affirmative of her 
answer that presently she was being jostled 
through the noisy confusion of the crowds 
in the streets on her way to visit the sick 
mother of her blue-coated conductor. The 
section of the village toward which they went 
was quieter than the streets with which she 



The Loosened Grip 87 

was familiar, and the Bible Woman could 
not but wonder, toward the end of their go- 
ing, at house after house in the neighborhood 
standing silent and deserted. Later on she 
was to find out the reason for this. 

An outer gate was opened presently by the 
lad, and a moment later Siok-leng stood in 
the guest room of a Chinese house and was 
being greeted with gentle graciousness by the 
fragile-looking little mother of the boy with 
whom she had come. 

The watermelon seeds were passed, and 
then when the boy had slipped out, and the 
women were alone, between sips of fragrant 
jassamine tea from tiny cups, the tragic 
story of the misfortune which had befallen 
that household was told. 

The fragile little woman, according to her 
own avowment, was in the controlling grip, 
dire and complete, of demons. Their first 
frightful invasion was entirely unannounced, 
the uncanny horde, led by one whom she 
called 'The Prince of Devils," having 
swarmed in upon her as she sat alone in her 
house one awful night twelve years before. 



88 The River Dragon's Bride 

So quiet and sane was the recital of her 
hostess, so calmly she told of the horrid de- 
tails of the torturing nocturnal visits, so cold 
grew the little hand which Siok-leng held in 
hers, that all her heart went out to the pitiful 
victim. 

The demons had come literally swarming 
into her house, so she told the Bible Woman 
— such legions of them that there was not 
sufficient room in all the house to hold them. 
Even she told Siok-leng of their hideous 
bodies, and bulging eyes, and long claws 
which opened and shut as though eager for 
prey. Altogether they were unspeakably ter- 
rible. And some, she said, were handsome 
devils — really handsome ! 

Such an one was he, their "Prince, " who 
snatched her about the waist and hissed into 
her ear that she must dance with him. At 
that she tried to shrink even farther away 
from his hot body, for she was a decent, high- 
class Chinese woman, and such women do 
not dance. And then tighter and tighter did 
he grip her, and wilder and wilder grew the 
mad whirlings, until, lifting the slight little 



The Loosened Grip 89 

body from the floor, her hellish torturer 
swung her upon her own tea table and com- 
manded her to sing. 

"And I sang, and I screamed aloud, like 
the wild thing they had driven me to be," the 
weary voice of the narrator went on, "until 
the neighborhood could hear my ravings and 
came rushing in, while this whole end of the 
village was in an uproar. With the coming 
of the people the hordes of demons fled away 
with shrieking laughter — only, every night 
for twelve long years they have returned to 
torture me — and I am tired — tired." 

Gradually the nearby families left the 
neighborhood, being very much afraid when 
in the night they could hear those ravings. 

The Bible Woman remembered the silent, 
empty houses past which her guide had led 
her not one hour since. To her now they 
spote mutely of the tangible outworking of 
fear, as a force in the lives of the people of 
her race. 

Very diligently too had the head of the 
house gone about securing relief for his little 
lady wife. She was the mother of his son, 



9© The River Dragon's Bride 

and, besides, he loved her. Many an idol 
shrine had been enriched by his gifts, many a 
priest made to chuckle over the silver he hid 
in his sleeve — but all to no end. The ghoul- 
ish visitants of the night still defied barred 
doors, and with great fury they violated that 
house. 

Strange news had lately trickled through 
to the afflicted family, concerning the woman 
from down the river who was known as a 
"Person of the Jesus Doctrine," and who 
daily taught the women of the village, and 
even went from house to house telling what 
the people were calling the "Good News." 
It was with the fervent hope that this Jesus 
God, a new deity in that community pan- 
theon, and about whom Siok-leng seemed to 
know much, might outdo, in a contest of 
strength, the malevolent disturbers of their 
peace, that the family had importuned the 
coming of the Bible Woman. 

Very carefully, very prayerfully then, did 
Siok-leng, sitting there, holding the cold lit- 
tle hand of the woman beside her, tell how 
that while she herself had no power over the 



The Loosened Grip 91 

evil things of the night, he who was her 
God was stronger than all the strong devils 
that had poured forth from hell to lash her 
into frenzy. It was he who could deliver her 
from their thrall. She spoke very solemnly 
that word, but also she spoke words concern- 
ing the conditions upon which only that God, 
never heard of by her before, could properly 
be entreated to come to that house. 

Certainly he, the only and all-powerful 
One, would tolerate the presence there of no 
other gods! All the idols must be taken 
down from the shelf. If anywhere in all the 
house, even in the darkest, most secret 
corner, there was hidden the smallest, most 
insignificant god — yes, or even a most 
precious one — out it must come into the light 
of day and go to its destruction with all these 
others w 7 hich must be burned out there in the 
courtyard of Heaven's Well with an utter 
and complete burning. All this did Siok- 
leng say. 

When the woman's eager assent was reg- 
istered, also that of the father of her son, 
and of that blue-coated light-of-the-eyes-of- 



92 The River Dragon's Bride 

his-parents himself, then a great smoke of 
burning idols arose from the courtyard of 
that dwelling, while the idol shelves in their 
erstwhile most honorable place yawned 
empty like a toothless mouth. 

The menacing deities having been dis- 
patched into the realm of such departed 
things upon the smoke of their consuming, 
then did Siok-leng begin her teachings of 
very sacred and fundamental, yet withal very 
simple, things in the genesis of the establish- 
ment in that house of faith in the Doctrine. 

Also Siok-leng opened to that anxious 
family the Holy Classic, through which was 
revealed to them that kindly divine Physi- 
cian who, when in the long ago he walked 
the ways of men, out of poor tortured folk 
like the mother of this house had cast many 
devils. Because these noisome things knew 
how futile was their case in combat with his 
great power they did not even try to answer 
back. There could be no answer to him, the 
Bible Woman told them. 

Also Siok-leng taught the eager woman, 
now trembling with a great hopefulness that 



The Loosened Grip 93 

her salvation was at hand, a little prayer. 
Chinese lips were saying it that day, yet it 
was the same petition which universal hu- 
manity through the years and under the 
stress of its burden has syllabled more often 
than any other — "Lord, save me." Indeed, 
it was this simple prayer which, should the 
demon intruders come that night, was to be 
upon the lips of their harried victim, a most 
holy and effectual talisman. 

"If they come to-night," Siok-leng care- 
fully admonished the woman, "at the very 
first sight or sound of them, kneel down 
quickly upon the floor, lift up your head 
boldly, and your arms, and cry out this 
prayer to Jesus Christ, who is more powerful 
alone than all the devils in hell, and they will 
leave you. Certainly they will go. Have 
no fear. In the name of Jesus Christ they 
must go." 

So, praying for peace upon that house, the 
Bible Woman went her way back to her 
lodging. Only first she assured the family 
that should they for any reason desire her 
during the night, her glad feet would bring 



94 The River Dragon's Bride 

her to them. And for long hours through 
that night Siok-leng prayed. In the behalf 
of a suffering woman she prayed that ef- 
fectual prayer which "changes things." 

The azalea flowers — that "all-over-the- 
mountain-red," which splashes with gor- 
geous color the hills of southern China — 
were shaking the dews of the night from 
their flaunting pennants — and the young 
spring was laughing out loud in the golden 
sunshine when, very early in the morning, 
Siok-leng sped out to that erstwhile house 
of sorrow upon the fringes of the little vil- 
lage. 

The outside gate stood ajar as though in 
wide-hearted welcome, and an instant later 
she stood inside the guest room, where only 
a few hours ago she had held the cold little 
hands of a soul-weary woman. She noted 
that the empty idol shelves had been heaped 
with glowing red azaleas — and she won- 
dered. 

She wondered no longer when into the 
guest room came unfalteringly, even though 
there lingered a degree of languor in her 



The Loosened Grip 95 

movement, that woman who for twelve long 
years had been veritably a woman of great 
sorrows. Very gently she came toward her 
guest, her face raised and shining as with a 
radiance not earthly, and withal overspread 
with a great peace. 

"Yes, they came," she answered the eager 
interrogation of the Bible Woman. "Oh, yes, 
they came !" And there were more than had 
ever before swarmed through her doorway, 
and they jeered and mocked and laughed as 
though to terrorize her, and conquer her by 
their very onslaught of hideous noise ! 

But something, so she said, had blocked 
them, where their fiery breath was almost 
close enough to scorch and wither her. She 
had slid from her chair to her knees there 
upon the floor, as Siok-leng had expressly 
instructed her, but now as the hateful horde 
advanced, and in her soul she knew that the 
ultimate crisis was at hand, almost her 
leaden arms refused to be lifted up — almost 
some awful magnetism from below chained 
her suffering face to the earth — almost her 
voice as she essayed to pray, that prayer, 



96 The River Dragon's Bride 

"Lord, save me," seemed drowned by the 
sound of her own pounding heart as well as 
by demon shriekings. 

In that final moment though, it was Siok- 
leng's pure strong face which visualized it- 
self for a moment before her frenzied vision. 
Very clearly in her awful extremity, so she 
afterward said, it was the sound of Siok- 
leng's calm, convincing voice saying, even as 
she herself had heard her say that very day : 
"Certainly they will go! Have no fear. In 
the name of Jesus Christ, they must go!" 
And as her own voice confidently arose above 
the demon din, even before the little prayer 
was finished, they did go ! 

And there was great peace upon that 
dwelling, which was never again in all the 
years that followed a House of Sorrow, but a 
House of Joy. 




VII 

THE BANDIT TRAIL 

HEN we left home our program did 
not include a jaunt through the 
bandit country. But, thanks to 
favoring circumstances when we 

reached the Middle Kingdom, neither did it 

preclude such a feature. 

O, it's great to go a- jaunting, 

Where a program doesn't bind you, 

And if adventure you're a-wanting, 
Cast your bait and one will find you. 

Not that we absolutely courted adventure, 
of course, but when it came our way at the 
beck of a willing mind, we did not sidestep it. 
Certainly we didn't! This particular un- 
usual happening came about through a visit 
to us while we lingered in the Happy Valley 
of two missionary folk from up river. They 
certainly had what Friend Chesterton would 
designate "personality," those two! At 

97 



98 The River Dragon's Bride 

least that is how I account for our ready 
promise to them of a return visit back where 
they told us they lived — "Back in the moun- 
tains in the bandit country, where you can't 
go any farther." 

Now, the jumping-off place had always 
had an enticing sound to my adventurous 
soul, and "where you can't go any farther" 
was its equivalent. But "bandits"! That 
"sold" the proposition to me and — well, we 
went. The journey took us again far up the 
stately old Ming, in the same old houseboat 
poled by the same old crew. The whole dis- 
tance covered was only a matter of a hun- 
dred miles each way. But when, including 
a stay of a couple of days at your destination, 
the going takes you ten days, and means 
houseboat and sampan, mountain chairs, and 
much of the time your own good feet — be- 
cause there isn't a mile of railroad in the 
province — one feels quite traveled when once 
more he is back in the Happy Valley. 

The voyage started auspiciously, and all 
went well for a few hours. Then the skipper 
balked. He ran the houseboat over shore- 



The Bandit Trail 99 

ward upon the very edge of a sand bar and 
absolutely refused to make the craft "walk" 
a pole's length farther. The little lady who 
runs a big industrial work for friendless Chi- 
nese widows down the river, was our be- 
loved personal conductor along this bandit 
trail, and although most politely she urged 
the dower-faced captain to resume the chan- 
nel immediately, she was politely, but I 
thought a bit scornfully, refused. Then the 
Personal Conductor scolded in her best and 
most forceful Chinese, only to be as em- 
phatically, even noisily, informed that the 
boat would not "walk." 

The reason? Perfectly simple. Had not 
the skipper told Cing-Soi, the foreign 
woman's houseman, when he bargained for 
the boat, that in the contract there must be 
the furnishing of one indispensable item by 
the foreigners themselves ? 

Now the bargain as made was that our 
party of five was to pay an aggregate amount 
of three dollars per day which covered the 
entire expense for all of us, save that for 
food and bedding. The latter we must pro- 



ioo The River Dragon's Bride 

vide. But the indispensable "something' ' 
without which the skipper would not allow 
his craft to be poled another stroke — "What 
was it?" urged the missionary. 

Then it came out, the statement of this 
astounding omission of us most negligent 
foreigners, which proved to be — the Amer- 
ican flag — nothing less. Shades of Betsy 
Ross — and this was China! Our skipper 
proceeded to elaborate his point. Did not 
the honorable but careless foreign guests 
know that they were embarked upon a some- 
what questionable voyage which would carry 
them through the very heart of the bandit 
country? Also were they not aware that 
the Chinese flag (when this protection was 
mildly suggested by one of us imbecile for- 
eigners) would but invite the confiscation of 
the houseboat, should the bandits in their 
maraudings around spy us from the shore? 
Absolutely, the Flowery Flag would be but 
as a painted rag in the eyes of the buccaneers. 
In fact, what the skipper said, all of which is 
too voluminous to record, was that were we 
to persist against his advice, we might as 



The Bandit Trail ioi 

well order our coffins — or, as far as he was 
concerned, its American equivalent, "Noth- 
ing doing," and he meant it too. 

Then, as often happens, in the very mo- 
ment of despair came inspiration. Came the 
vision of a church in Boston, back home — a 
million miles away it seemed that morning 
— a church crowded to the doors with mis- 
sionary pilgrims. Came also the memory of 
one face in the throng — of a silken flag sent 
forward with the loving urge that it be the 
talisman upon the long trail which one in 
that Sabbath day multitude was about to 
begin. 

It was this flag, then, which, sewed by 
eager fingers to a stair rod, one of the three 
holding down a bit of matting on the diminu- 
tive stairs leading from cabin to deck, was in 
a real American jiffy flying bravely from the 
stern of our craft. Most devoutly did we 
thank Heaven as well as the generous heart 
of the donor of that blessed bit of silk that 
its proportions were sufficiently ample to 
splash the sunshine with color enough to be 
seen from the shore. 



102 The River Dragon's Bride 

The effect of this improvised flag raising 
was instantaneous. The skipper emerged 
from surliness to serenity, from scowls to 
smiles. The coolies stripped off their 
patched jackets and reached for their poles. 
The very eyes of our boat bulged with be- 
nignity as, to the weird crooning of our boat- 
men's song, we once more cut the upstream 
current. 

That was one unique cruise, let me tell 
you! There was a world of folk upon the 
river. The women of the sampans, their 
floating domiciles drawn for purposes of 
house-cleaning upon occasional stretches of 
sandy beach, were conducting vigorous cam- 
paigns of scrubbing. Cunning pig-tailed 
kiddies frolicked on the sands, while fat little 
babies, securely anchored to the boats by 
ropes tied about their middles, made frantic 
efforts to fall off and get drowned. Every 
sort of weird-looking craft which could be 
conjured by one's imagination, or dreamed of 
by a poet, or sung about by a singer, floated 
past us on its way to the sea. There were 
great brown sails, like the outspread wings 



The Bandit Trail 103 

of some huge, impossible bird. There were 
tattered, ragged ones and others, white once, 
now gray, splotched with blue patches — the 
color in which all China clothes itself. There 
were silent, mysterious craft which passed 
us, and others from which peered out cu- 
rious but kindly faces. The family wash, 
consisting inevitably and unvaryingly of blue 
coats and trousers, flew with animation from 
the bamboo poles, upon which, across some 
quarter of many boats it was hung, or, 
rather, impaled, since clothespins were 
minus. 

It was a journey which took us through 
the tumultuous upper reaches of the Ming, 
one to prove the mettle of our boatmen and 
the poise of our own nerves. Gigantic rocks 
and bowlders, as well as hidden and danger- 
ous reefs, here strew the river bed, while the 
rushing waters, maddened at the obstruc- 
tions in their seaward course, plunge franti- 
cally at the houseboat as though to tear it to 
atoms. No crew could pole against such 
frenzied force, and alone steer our craft 
around the jagged horn of a rock of immense 



104 The River Dragon's Bride 

bulk which thrust itself outward as though 
to gore our prow. 

Time and time again they attempted it, to 
fail as often, every new venture sending our 
poor little boat back again downstream far 
beyond the point where the last fresh start 
was made. The whole effort finally ended 
with half our crew, harnessed with ropes 
which were firmly fastened to the boat, 
crawling across the rocks to the shore. Once 
there, bent, like beasts, upon all fours, they 
crept along the mountainside, and with the 
terrific poling of the straining, sweating, 
yelling coolies on the houseboat we finally 
rounded the point and glided peacefully into 
the placid waters of the channel. 

While all these noisy nautical maneuvers 
were in process I saw creeping along the 
precipitous sides of the mountainous shore, 
fairly in the wake of our straining crew, a 
little blue-coated, blue-trousered woman. 
The memory of her will always prick at my 
heart. She too was creeping upon hands 
and feet, and harnessed about her shoulders 
was the cable pulled taut from its fastening 




Photographed by the author 

THE STRUGGLING BIT OF FEMININITY ON 
THE SHORE 



The Bandit Trail 105 

to the big lumber sampan, which behind us 
had all day been making its slow course up- 
stream. 

To some mother's heart back in baby days 
she might have been "Fragrant Flower" or 
'Thousand Gold" — I do not know. Probably 
to the very boat she was pulling, as in some 
sheltered harbor it lay near the great city 
below, she was carried one day a bride in her 
red chair. Perhaps from under its bamboo 
cover in the dark of some night had trem- 
bled the feeble wail of the first baby she had 
cuddled next to her heart. Others had come 
afterward; we could see several sturdy 
youngsters playing upon the diminutive rear 
deck while an implacable-looking old mother- 
in-law squatted in solid comfort, with her to- 
bacco pipe in her hands. 

Forward on the boat, owner and overlord 
of all he surveyed, stood the head of this 
floating residence, a stalwart Chinese man. 
With raucous voice and angry gesticulation 
he was shouting directions to that little, 
despised, creeping thing upon the shore, his 
wife, whose little brown shoulders were raw 



106 The River Dragon's Bride 

under the chafing of the rope, as upon all 
fours she strained to the killing point, as she 
tugged the sampan through that frantic cur- 
rent. 

My soul turned sick within me. as, fasci- 
nated with the very tragedy of it all, I stared 
wide-eyed at the struggling bit of femininity 
on the shore, until, our own boat rounding a 
turn in the river, it was lost to my vision. 
But to me for always that Daughter of 
Cathay, bearing not only her rightful 
burden of wifehood and motherhood, but the 
back-breaking load of an all but impossible 
manual task, must symbolize the woman- 
hood of the world where Christ is not. In 
the name of the Eternal Equities can it be 
possible that the women of America shall 
always have so much, and those of the Orient 
so little of that which makes life radiant ? 

But it is near the end of our second day out 
and the sun declines. With the last of its 
gold it sets a crown upon the mountaintops, 
and fuses into gorgeous carmine the azaleas 
which splash their slopes. For it is azalea 
time in China, and one entirely ceases to 



The Bandit Trail 107 

wonder why the character which designates 
the brilliant blossom translated literally 
" All-o ver-the-mountain-red. ' ' 

If there be a question in your mind as to 
China's claim to being the "Flowery King- 
dom" just take the Bandit Trail in May 
through the mountains to Kucheng. Young 
spring had tripped that way a day or two 
before us, and she had spilled her flower bas- 
ket. There were long, white sprays of bridal 
wreath, and a fragrant network of wild 
honeysuckle, clambering over the green 
undergrowth. 

A single bloom of that shower of briar 
roses could not have been covered by one of 
your grandmother's flaring teacups — which 
you will term exaggeration, but which, upon 
my word, is not. The pear flowers scattered 
their petals like snowflakes upon our heads, 
and wide-eyed blue violets looked out from 
the green lacery of ferns. Wild strawberries 
promised a luscious find to some subsequent 
wayfarer, and the pampas-grass whispered 
gentle secrets into our ears as we passed. 

The watery surface of the paddy fields was 



108 The River Dragon's Bride 

beginning to show a sheen of pale jade green, 
and the feathery fronds of the tall bamboos 
were joyously bending under the sweet 
breath of the wind. Somewhere in those 
mountains through which we trekked that 
day in our swinging chairs the spring sat 
enthroned. We walked her path, we almost 
saw the elusive young thing herself. 

But remember this was also the Bandit 
Trail, and the very stones which paved it 
had only a few months before run red with 
blood. Again and again our shouts to each 
other were stilled, as our caravan filed si- 
lently, Indian fashion, through the desolate 
ruins of once thriving villages. Nothing 
now remained of them but charred and crum- 
bling walls, over which even in so brief a 
time and, as if to cover their wounds, kindly 
Mother Nature was throwing a garment of 
softest green. 

The uprising of the bandits, whose per- 
sonnel included ex-soldiers, and even men 
who were themselves mountain men, had 
been widespread and violent. Masquerading 
under the patriotic cloak of "Love of Coun- 




Photographed by the author 

"THE FEATHERY FRONDS OF THE TALL 
BAMBOOS" 



The Bandit Trail 109 

try," the name by which they designated their 
order, they mustered their legions by thou- 
sands, declared death to all officials and if 
refused tribute money by the villages, looted, 
murdered, and burned. 

To the big walled city down in the plain 
during that veritable reign of terror fled 
thousands of refugees from the sorely dis- 
turbed heights round about. It was to this 
same city, rising like an enchanted island 
from a sea of green, and etched out of a 
golden sunset, which gladdened our eyes as 
our coolies swung down the last descent, and 
we knew that we beheld the end of the trail. 
But not half so much did the sight of the city 
gladden our eyes as did another. Finally 
down the last mountainside we in our chairs, 
now grown hard in the long going, wound 
past a living streamer of blue — a human 
streamer — made up of hundreds of school- 
boys, immaculate in their clean blue cotton 
gowns, who with their professors, dignified 
beyond expression and quite as kindly, had 
gathered there to give us welcome. Outside 
the city gate were assembled the girls in quite 



no The River Dragon's Bride 

as imposing a line of their own, while behind 
them grouped the older women from the 
Bible Training School. It was the girls too, 
I love to remember, who gave us that 
thrilling firecracker salute! Firecrackers! 
After China no worldly welcome for me, I 
fear, can ever be quite complete without 
their noisy heartsomeness. 

The Doctor, however, in the Mission 
House on the hill was the spellbinder, who 
away into the wee hours held us enthralled 
with stories of the bandits. For let me tell 
you this Doctor — and his was a double title, 
by the way, attained by the medical as well as 
the theological route — had had more than 
one "close-up" with these Gentlemen of the 
Greenwood. As a skillful surgeon and physi- 
cian in his own hospital as also among the 
poor in their own wretched dwellings he was 
known to all who lived in that section of the 
province. 

As shepherd of the flock in the fold of the 
church with a cross on its spire down in the 
teeming city, and upon occasions, the itiner- 
ating preacher who had found his way into 



The Bandit Trail hi 

many of those "other villages," his name was 
hallowed in a thousand homes. It was this 
Doctor, then, who in the waning of a wonder- 
ful day related to us how upon a certain night 
not so long before our coming he had been 
the guest of the bandit chief and his savage 
crew in a village high up in the mountains 
and with no man of his own race near. 

All through those months of bloody ma- 
rauding there was one fact which was out- 
standing in its significance. Though death 
without mercy was to be the portion of all 
officials luckless enough to fall into their 
hands, and a similar fate was to be visited 
upon the inhabitants of resisting villages, by 
solemn edict of the bandit chief himself upon 
neither the person nor the property of Chris- 
tians were violent hands to be laid. If there 
were needed convincing proof of the prac- 
tical power of the Christian faith upon the 
non-Christian mind, it would seem to be here. 
But with such protection available for be- 
lievers it followed logically that just at that 
particular season the church both within the 
walled city and in the surrounding villages 



ii2 The River Dragon's Bride 

was deluged with applications from those 
who craved entrance. Verily, to save one's 
life is worth the abandonment of even the 
family idols! 

But there was no "revival" of this sort 
encouraged by the mission just now. Those 
recruiting agencies for souls, the churches, 
except when regular services were held, were 
absolutely closed. Be assured that those 
missionaries of ours, the Doctor and all the 
rest, both to bandit and brothers are likewise 
Apostles of the Square Deal. For that 
reason there was displayed upon the breast 
of every Christian a scrap of yellow, the 
characters upon which registered his name, 
his church, and the exact location of the lat- 
ter. As proof that these were authentic 
facts there were appended the name of the 
pastor, the superintendent of the district, and 
the mission director — the last being the Doc- 
tor himself. The name-roll too by which 
these established ones could be verified, was 
not one of these nailed to the door of every 
church ? 

It was during these anxious days that the 



The Bandit Trail 113 

Doctor, urged by some human necessity in 
a distant mountain village, had taken his 
way there on foot, accompanied only by one 
of his students from the mission school. The 
human necessity dealt with, the Doctor and 
his aide, having covered some distance upon 
their homeward way, found themselves with 
evening upon them still a matter of some six- 
teen miles from their objective. More, they 
had thrust upon them by wayfarers upon the 
mountain path as they neared this particular 
village the rather disconcerting information 
that, since it had recently been appropriated 
by the robber chief and several hundred of 
his followers, it would be a most desirable 
locality to avoid. 

The Doctor, devoutly wishing that days in 
this season were longer, and making a hasty 
but definite decision to speed up and cover 
the miles between him and home by morning, 
was entirely unafraid, but decidedly dis- 
gusted, to be met at the edge of the town by 
the bearer of a polite invitation from the big 
bandit for an interview. 

Now, several critical cases in the hospital 



ii4 The River Dragon's Bride 

and some important parish matters were 
very much just then the stronger urge in 
the Doctor's program than such casual mat- 
ters as visits to bandit chiefs. So with all 
proper politeness — no one could outdo the 
medical man there — he instructed the runner 
to return to headquarters with the message 
that the most unworthy and insignificant 
foreign doctor was very much in a hurry, and 
while it caused him great regret to decline 
the most honorable Chief's gracious invita- 
tion to penetrate into his august seclusion, 
he must hasten upon his way. 

On the two men from the valley sped along 
the winding trail (for the black night was 
coming down upon them) only to be over- 
taken in time by the second runner. He 
carried a message like unto the first, that the 
voice of the most exalted foreign Doctor 
would be esteemed as pleasantest music in 
the ears of the Chief, who begged that the 
honorable Doctor would condescend to re- 
main for the night under his own most un- 
worthy, if somewhat temporary, roof. 

So back trudged the head of the hospital in 



The Bandit Trail 115 

the plain, murmuring under his breath — to 
pacify his own impatience at such an ex- 
hibition of Chinese perseverance — ' 'After all 
it costs nothing to be polite/' I have the Doc- 
tor's word that he said nothing more than 
that! 

It was quite the most pretentious house 
in that village, now deserted by all but the 
bandit crew, to which the Doctor w T as con- 
ducted. Through the outer gate, across the 
court of Heaven's Well, and into the guest 
hall he followed his guide. Then after be- 
ing much kowtowed to by various bandit dig- 
nitaries and the making of much ceremonious 
politeness upon his own part, into the most 
august presence of the worst outlaw in south 
China was ushered the Doctor. 

And the outlaw himself ? Oh, he was no- 
body of very terrible personal presence, so 
the Doctor told me. In fact, he was still in 
his twenties, and a real boyishness — albeit a 
somewhat savage boyishness — seemed still 
to garment his personality. That he had 
outstanding indications of such qualities as 
would make for crude and cruel leadership 



n6 The River Dragon's Bride 

there was no denying, and inwardly the 
visitor congratulated himself, as he was con- 
ducted to the place of honor at the right of 
his host as he sat upon the bed, that the velvet 
side of banditry, he had reason to believe, 
was turned toward him. The inevitable 
watermelon seeds, the tea and the cakes were 
immediately forthcoming. You might easily 
have supposed that company of cutthroats to 
be perfectly tame and tractable Chinese men 
as with the Doctor, dangling his legs over 
the side of the Chinese board bed, they all, 
there in the lantern glow, ate their cakes and 
munched their melon seeds in peace and 
quiet. But no one could blame the guest, if 
his imagination led him (he knowing them 
so well) to fancy he saw red blood upon the 
hands that served him! 

It was after all formalities and conventions 
had been scrupulously observed and his per- 
sonal staff dismissed by the Chief that there 
was revealed to the Doctor the real reason 
for this somewhat forced seance. The ban- 
dit stated that for many moons he had had 
great desire to have words with the man who 



The Bandit Trail 117 

was now his guest, but that until this very 
night he had failed to attain the desire of his 
heart. It became evident early in the some- 
what one-sided conversation which there- 
after ensued, that the outlaw was for some 
reason or other making very decided efforts 
to meet his guest on a positively fraternal 
basis ! To further promote his obvious pur- 
pose in thus entertaining his wholly un- 
willing guest, he advanced presently the 
somewhat astounding argument, that, 
though appearances in proof thereof were 
usually wanting, his conviction was that the 
mission of Christians and that of bandits 
were really identical. 

The members of his army, to whom he had 
applied the opprobrious titles with which the 
whole countryside was familiar — these were, 
according to the Chief, honest-to-goodness 
"Love of Country Men." They were pa- 
triots of the highest order, bent solely upon 
the uplift of their fellow men. As such they 
were entitled to their living at the hands of 
the populace, and, failing to receive it, they 
were certainly acting quite within their 



n8 The River Dragon's Bride 

rights to appropriate by force that which 
their necessities required. 

Were not the Christians likewise "uplift" 
people? Certainly the bandits themselves 
recognized them as such, and had treated 
them and should continue to treat them as 
brethren! Was there not pasted upon the 
wall of the very room in which they were 
then conferring the list of rules issued by the 
Chief himself, governing all bandit proce- 
dure ? And would the honorable Doctor no- 
tice the first of these? 

So there in the flare of the primitive lan- 
tern which his .self -constituted host himself 
held high, the Doctor read in Chinese char- 
acters : 

"To any man killing a Christian or burn- 
ing or injuring a Christian church — death." 

All of this, you have surmised, was leading 
up to something, and the big Chief's particu- 
lar cat was now out of the bag. The big 
Chief, that most bloody and terrifying some- 
body in the whole province, wanted — to build 
a church! He stated his convictions and 
made his proposition very clearly and, the 



The Bandit Trail 119 

Doctor assured me, almost eagerly. His 
convictions were that churches were good, 
and made for the uplift of the community. 
So were Christians. After the present- un- 
rest in the mountains had settled down a bit 
he himself very much desired a church in 
his own village. In fact, so earnestly did 
his heart desire such a consummation that he, 
being possessed with a fair share of this 
world's goods — that he himself would con- 
tribute the plot of ground upon which the 
church should be builded. To bring about 
his heart's desire he would go even further 
— he would furnish all the necessary funds 
that the walls might be raised and the build- 
ing completed. All this time this polite cut- 
throat had himself conducted the major por- 
tion of the conversation. Now he waited 
for his guest to speak. 

You may conjure up the picture to your 
own satisfaction. The Doctor, high up in a 
mountain village almost on the edge of the 
world, the enforced guest of the man at the 
beck of whose finger villages had gone up in 
smoke, treasures were looted, and hundreds 



120 The River Dragon's Bride 

of innocent folk come to their deaths ! And 
it was this man of blood, surrounded by 
three hundred or more of his kind, the most 
hated, the most feared in a province, who 
was proposing to a lone missionary in a hovel 
on a mountaintop at midnight, to build a 
Christian church ! 

I think I should have liked to see the 
Doctor just then. He was a Manxman be- 
fore ever he had won a degree and his hair 
had a dash of red in its fiber — and mayhap, 
also his temper. At any rate he warmed up 
considerably, albeit his eyes held a twinkle 
as he outlined the potential proportions of 
the bandit chief's proposition. To begin 
with, it was evidently the purpose of this 
adroit marauder to attempt to stage a come- 
back into peaceful pursuits of life. It may 
have been that down in some musty corner 
of his heart there remained one good impulse 
which was prompting him to make amends in 
the sight of the people, and while the time 
seemed opportune, for his career of murder 
and crime. A church would furnish tangible 
evidence of a change of heart. The accom- 



The Bandit Trail 121 

plishment of his plan would go a long way 
toward establishing him in the good graces 
of the public. 

But to the Doctor, sitting there in state 
on the bed beside the bandit, there was quite 
a different aspect to this church-building 
proposition. While it was altogether de- 
sirable that the Chief should mend his ways, 
a church which should stand as a monument 
to such transformation would be plainly 
undesirable. Certain it is that to most of 
the community it would have been substan- 
tial evidence that gross sins could be atoned 
for by very material means. The priests in 
their temples were telling them the same 
thing. Then the Doctor didn't particularly 
care to start the "one-man church" in China. 
The present proposition would result, if ac- 
cepted, not solely in a "one-man church/ ' 
which of a certainty such a one would be, 
but a bandit-bossed church at that ! Many of 
the villagers whose homes had been deso- 
lated and whose fields had been ruined and 
whose relatives had been killed, at the order 
of this would-be benefactor, might be a bit 



122 The River Dragon's Bride 

nervous about going to his church. This 
should not be, for surely the doors of a true 
church should swing wide upon their hinges, 
and no fear should hover there! 

All this the Doctor elucidated honestly and 
plainly to his host, there in the dim light of 
the dying lantern flame that night. Also he 
preached to him that night of One who had 
said, in the long ago, and was repeating it 
to-day to guilty souls: "Though your sins 
be as scarlet, I will make them white as snow : 
though they be red like crimson, they shall 
be as wool/' 

Very early in the morning the Doctor and 
his student, having bided safely with the ban- 
dits for the night, struck the trail down the 
mountainside for home. 

If you are asking if the story ends here, 
I am telling you that it does not — quite — for 
I have in my treasure sheaf from China a 
bit of pasteboard — a calling card it is — on 
which are three sets of most imposing char- 
acters. Upon the reverse side the Doctor 
himself, who gave me this trophy, has writ- 
ten with his own hand, " 'Mr. Dang/ Ku- 



The Bandit Trail 123 

cheng Bandit, now 'Col. Dang/ in Govern- 
ment Service/' 

The Colonel had been his recent visitor. 




THE BANDIT'S CALLING CABD 




VIII 

THE RIVER DRAGON'S BRIDE 

|HEN the stage is set for this epi- 
sode, the telling of an old tale by 
an old scholar, there must be in- 
cluded a glowing fire upon a 
hearth, around which down in China's south 
country there gathers a shivering group of 
foreigners. 

If I must clear myself of inaccuracy as to 
"shivering" in the south country, I would 
simply say that down there in the Happy 
Valley, after the rainy season has thor- 
oughly saturated the landscape for a week or 
two, folks do shiver over a fire, provided 
they have one, whether or not they are sup- 
posed to. 

I myself know of no climate on earth 
which absolutely trues itself with its hall- 
mark — do you? Climate everywhere has 
a chronic habit of being "unusual." Once I 
124 



The River Dragon's Bride 125 

actually saw it snow where "Afric's sunny 
fountains/' according to the hymn-book, 
were supposed perpetually to play. 

But to go back to the Happy Valley. 
There was a crackling fire on the hearth at 
the Mission House, and the smoke from the 
aromatic wood that was burning rose, sweet 
like temple incense, save that unlike that it 
suggested wholesomeness and purity. What 
matter that the rain and wind battled about 
the corners of the house, pursuing each other 
across the lawn from whence occasionally we 
could hear the limbs of the old camphor tree 
crack like artillery play under their com- 
bined assault. If the penetrating chill had 
crept inside and clammily trailed across walls 
and floor, there was also the cheering circle 
of warmth from our fire, and we, a group of 
wayfarers, drawn to this spot from devious 
distances, comforted ourselves within its 
cheery glow. 

Likewise there was with us the Old 
Scholar. I am not yet sure when he entered. 
Certainly, he had not been there while there 
were being exchanged our experiences 



126 The River Dragon's Bride 

apropos of the junk shop expedition of the 
afternoon. Oh, those altogether enticing 
Chinese junk shops — my memory thrills to 
them yet! Hidden away in queer crannies, 
around unlooked-for corners, in mysterious 
alleyways, all of which somewhere inter- 
sected the big street, they yielded forth to 
the eager searcher treasures more or less 
ancient (the Chinese gauge of value), always 
fascinating, as also cheap if the persistent 
searcher can worst the merchant at the di- 
verting little Chinese game of browbeating. 
Certainly, the Old Scholar was not pres- 
ent while everybody in the fireside group 
talked at once. Not even we daring Occi- 
dentals would be sufficiently blatant to frivol 
in the presence of such a perfect product of 
China's age, dignity, and learning. None of 
us, had we been interrogated, could have ac- 
curately told just when the visitor out of the 
storm entered the room. Suddenly, quite 
without announcement or abruptness, he was 
there, standing well within the door, gravely 
saluting us, while we, instinctively rising, 
were apprehensively taking a mental inven- 



The River Dragon's Bride 127 

tory of our probable ability to appear less 
boorish than we felt. 

As we surveyed him there, tall and im- 
pressive, his aristocratic line accentuated by 
a long black coat of silk, and his finely 
shaped head crowned by a satin cap with a 
glistening knob of red, it was like being sud- 
denly confronted by some venerable though 
still forceful king or potentate, without be- 
ing arrayed in one's festive garments. We 
foreigners may think ourselves the ultimate 
in matters of proper conventions, but how at 
our many blunderings must the Oriental 
laugh behind his facial mask of benignant 
imperturbability ! 

There was a genial gravity, if I may so 
speak, which clothed our visitor. It was as 
though the sunshine of his soul smiled se- 
renely above the long years of his human 
experience with its various vicissitudes. 

For thirty years had the Old Scholar in- 
ducted, with varying degrees of success, the 
foreigners of the Concession into the terri- 
fying mazes of the speech of his ancestors. 
No Oriental with his most exalted reverence 



128 The River Dragon's Bride 

for a teacher could ever surpass the admira- 
tion and veneration which was felt for the 
Old Scholar by every foreigner who had 
been so favored of the gods as to be his pupil. 

For the major part of those thirty years 
during which there in the Happy Valley he 
had listened to young missionaries in their 
frantic attempts to "coo the tones" — which 
achievement in Chinese seems to underlie all 
possibility of success — he had stoutly re- 
fused to believe the Doctrine. For all those 
years he had read in his daily lessons with 
them such teachings out of the Chinese 
translation of the New Testament as were 
never uttered by the sages who spoke in his 
Classics. Obdurately he withstood their un- 
mistakable power, even though with clinched 
teeth and against his conviction. He was a 
Chinese of the Chinese. He would admit no 
Western God to dominate his thought, much 
less to sit upon the throne of his heart. As 
were his fathers before him so would he be, 
and his mental conclusion toward the Doc- 
trine was the Chinese equivalent for "Finis." 

Then Kwan-Yin, his wife, a humble but 



The River Dragon's Bride 129 

loving follower of Jesus Christ, had died. 
Very truly had the Old Scholar loved her, 
and withal it was the light which had shone 
in the Vale of the Shadows, as she unafraid 
passed through, which led him to her God. 
They tell me that no one who saw the Old 
Scholar move gravely down the aisle to the 
altar in church that Sabbath morning, when 
having made his great and final decision he 
formally allied himself with the people of 
the Doctrine, will be likely ever to forget it. 
When we knew him it was years after that, 
and when being thoroughly established in 
the truth, he towered in kingly character 
above the rank and file of men even as over 
across the Ming, Kushan, the sacred moun- 
tain, looks down at the little hills at her feet. 
But it was not of himself that the guest 
at our fireside spoke that evening while the 
wind and rain reveled outside and, all po- 
liteness having been performed, we once 
more at our ease sat in a circle about the 
glowing fire, widened a bit now by his se- 
rene presence. It was of things Chinese 
that he spoke, much that he told us being 



130 The River Dragon's Bride 

first-hand information in regard to quaint 
and curious customs of Cathay, in response 
to our eager questionings. 

In all my quiver of lore and legend culled 
from time to time in many climes there is 
not treasured any more exquisitely lovely 
than the tale told that wonderful night, by 
the Old Scholar, of the River Dragon's 
Bride. As much like he told it to us as it is 
in me here to repeat it, I am faithfully telling 
it to you. 

For five thousand years the folklore and 
fairy tales of China have been written down 
in books. Long before that they lived in the 
hearts of the people. I gathered from what 
the narrator said indeed that to-day, as ever, 
once out of school the Chinese pay no greater 
attention to their Classics, provided they be 
not scholars by profession, than do Amer- 
icans to theirs. Fiction and folklore are 
loved by old and young among these imag- 
inative and lovable folk, and probably far 
more than the entire bulk of their Classics 
do these influence their mind. 

When, therefore, little olive-skinned chil- 



The River Dragon's Bride 131 

dren point to a canoe-like craft, long, slen- 
der, graceful, carefully protected alike from 
sun and rain in some conspicuous spot near 
their community center — had not we our- 
selves often seen such an one in our faring 
through the river country? — they will be 
told that once upon the day of the Dragon 
Festival this boat was a winner in a furious 
race with boats of other villages. And the 
story I am telling you as accounting for the 
Dragon Boat Races is the same one which 
for a thousand years Chinese mothers have 
told their children. 

It was very long ago when first these 
strange events were recorded. It was in 
that golden age of old Cathay when the jus- 
tice of Heaven seemed most actively em- 
ployed with the affairs of men, and all the 
Flowery Kingdom rejoiced because of 
abounding prosperity. 

But there came one dark day when the 
beloved Emperor, he who sat in the Purple 
Palace, ruled in righteousness and dispensed 
with equity and justice the affairs of state, 
laid aside his scepter adorned with jade and 



132 The River Dragon's Bride 

virgin gold, and mounted up to become a 
guest of the Dragon on High. 

There then arose in the land an Emperor 
who was utterly selfish at heart. Misrule 
and wicked craftiness and great cruelty char- 
acterized his reign, and the people, bowed 
under oppression, mourned because of the 
evil days which had fallen upon them. The 
gods themselves turned deaf ears toward 
them, though they crowded the temples and 
cast before the altars their most precious 
possessions. The smoke of costly incense, 
freighted with the pitiful petitions of the 
people, rolled upward from every shrine in 
the land. To crown their sorrows there came 
down upon the stricken country, already re- 
duced to direst penury by the failure of crops 
and the levy of heavy taxes, a famine so sore 
that no record of such an one had ever been 
written down in all the annals of the Middle 
Kingdom. 

On such a day of human misery and stress 
certain evil priests, acting willingly under 
the direction of the unrighteous king, who 
saw here a fine chance to benefit materially 



The River Dragon's Bride 133 

in purse out of human suffering — ancient 
ancestor that he was of the modern profiteer 
— proclaimed an oracle from the gods. It 
had been divinely revealed, so they blatantly 
affirmed, that only would prosperity and hap- 
piness again descend upon the stricken king- 
dom were an offering, inconceivably great 
and precious, made to the terrible Dragon 
God whose habitation was in the slimy depths 
of the river. No wonder that the frenzied 
people, rising from their hunger and disease, 
clamored loudly that no gift which could 
lift them out of their distress could be too 
valuable, no offering too costly. 

When later they learned from the lips 
of the perfidious priests that the only 
oblation acceptable to the angry Dragon of 
the River would be the loveliest maid in all 
the realm, arrayed in bridal grandeur and 
bedecked with jewels worthy of a king's ran- 
som, they could scarce believe their ears. 
And when, moreover, they knew that upon 
a certain day to be proclaimed the luckless 
lady was to be conveyed in her nuptial chair 
of red to the water's edge, from thence in 



134 The River Dragon's Bride 

a flower-festooned barge to be rowed by si- 
lent oarsmen to her doom in midstream, there 
was mourning over all the land. 

But to the credulous populace all this was 
believed to be the will of the gods. They had 
suffered much. Evidently, the wrath of the 
gods could be appeased only by some such 
costly sacrifice. 

The thing was done, and later upon a 
lonely beach the body of the ill-fated Bride 
of Death, stripped of its jewels by agents of 
the diabolical priests, floated down the river's 
current to be lost to sight forever in the sea. 
Strange to relate, the plagues which devas- 
tated the land were stayed, and it was small 
wonder that thereafter for hundreds of years, 
upon the annual recurrence of that day, to 
provide against the future fury of the venge- 
ful River Dragon, a similar tragic sacrifice 
was made. 

One day after a long time, there ascended 
the imperial throne, by the road of the con- 
queror, a most upright young emperor who 
was set to exalt all good and put down evil. 
Immediately discerning the hideous fraud 



The River Dragon's Bride 135 

which for so long had been perpetrated upon 
the unsuspecting people by the evil descend- 
ants of those priests of former days, he re- 
solved for once and all to put an end to it. 

For the first time during his reign the day 
approached, the fifth day of the fifth moon, 
when once more there was to be chosen the 
hapless victim who was doomed to be offered 
to the River Dragon. 

The choice, made by a self-appointed com- 
mission of two priests and a conscienceless 
priestess, fell upon the idolized and only 
daughter of a high official family. Beauti- 
ful beyond all words was the chosen maid. 
All the terms applied by ancient poets to the 
ravishing beauty of court favorites might 
have been employed in describing her. Had 
one inch been added to her height she had 
been too tall. Her stature diminished by a 
hair's breadth would have made her too 
short. One more fleck of powder had ren- 
dered her too pale, while another touch of 
rouge would have ruined her color. Like 
the plumage of the jewel bird were her ador- 
able eyebrows and her skin was as satin. Her 



136 The River Dragon's Bride 

waist was like a roll of new silk and her 
teeth like small white shells. Her many 
suitors, lured from afar by rumors of her 
loveliness, covered their faces, even when 
they glimpsed her from a distance, unable 
to bear the splendor of her charms. It was 
such an one as this princess over whose luck- 
less head the muddy waters of the river were 
soon to close, to satisfy, not an angryr-iver 
deity, but rather the insatiable greed of the 
evil priests. 

The family of the princess was mad with 
grief. The only son, her brother, clad in 
coarse sackcloth, visited the temple and upon 
his knees before the idols vowed to perform 
the extreme rite of consuming his own cooked 
flesh; he would renounce his inheritance as 
the only son of his father, and for the rest of 
his life beg, a mendicant, from place to place, 
could only the awful edict which pronounced 
his adored sister's doom be revoked. The 
whole city was plunged into mourning but 
it was all to no avail. The decision of the 
gods, as revealed to the Commission of 
Three, must stand. 



The River Dragon's Bride 137 

Preparations for the bridal of death were 
set in motion. Almost all the city was bid- 
den to the feast, which, according to custom, 
must be given by the father of the bride be- 
fore she should start in her marriage chair 
upon the fateful journey from which she 
would never return. 

Now there was one in the capital city who 
was not bidden to the feast, and strange to 
say, this was the young Emperor who had 
but within recent moons taken his seat upon 
the Dragon Throne. Whether or not this 
omission was an oversight, or at the com- 
mand of the priests, it was not necessary to 
fathom, since in China, then as now, the 
sending of a gift to the bride, whether or not 
a gorgeous scarlet invitation has been re- 
ceived, would insure to the donor thereof a 
warm welcome to the wedding. 

Therefore on the day appointed for the 
strange bridal, there emerged from the Pur- 
ple Palace a train of servants bearing upon 
salvers of finest lacquer a gift of such sump- 
tuousness as none but royalty could devise, 
and whose glistening grandeur was unbe- 



138 The River Dragon's Bride 

lievable. There were gorgeous flowers 
whose petals were of coral and jade, every 
one of which trembled like those of a real 
blossom. There were butterflies of greenest 
jade and bracelets frosted with pearls. 
There w T ere garlands of plum blossoms 
wrought of milk-white pearls, and chains of 
gold, and rolls of rarest silk, and embroid- 
ered garments. All of these gifts were sent 
by the Emperor to the house of the bride's 
father, and shortly after their arrival came 
the monarch himself. The multitude of 
guests already gathered made way for him 
as straight and strong and regal, yet kindly 
of face and benignant of mien, he strode to 
the seat of honor which had hastily been pre- 
pared for him. He looked every whit what 
his ancient title designated him — the Son of 
Heaven. 

The wretched little bride, all clad in her 
bridal finery heavy with jewels, and trem- 
bling with the great fear which was upon 
her, was presently led from her own apart- 
ment, in which during the feast she had sat 
aside weeping. She was about to be placed 



The River Dragon's Bride 139 

in the red chair, when her attendants were 
halted by. the voice of the Emperor. 

"I do not yet see the bridegroom/' he 
said, speaking clearly amidst the great si- 
lence which now covered the throng of wed- 
ding guests. "Surely," he went on, "the 
bride will not leave her father's roof until 
her happy husband comes to claim her. Has 
he not yet come?" 

A great hope began to stir in the hearts 
of the people as the words of their young Em- 
peror fell upon their ears, while the bride's 
family, prostrated in sorrow, scarce dared 
believe they heard aright. 

"Has the bridegroom not yet come?" 
again asked the royal questioner. 

And all the people murmured, "No one 
has come." 

"Then," resumed he, "we must know why 
he tarries so late. I will send at once to his 
palace which you say is at the bottom of the 
river, a messenger who will announce to him 
that his lovely bride awaits him here." 

The head priest of the evil trio, who were 
now on the swift road to their complete un- 



140 The River Dragon's Bride 

doing, was the first runner to be dispatched. 
Willing hands provided him prompt conduct 
to the barge, which, gay with its flowers, lay 
waiting at the water's edge for the poor lit- 
tle bride. Without a further word, the priest 
upon whom grim retribution had so suddenly 
fallen was rowed to midstream, there to take 
the path to the palace of the River Dragon 
which he himself had designed for the lily 
feet of a lovely maid. 

At the house of the bride's father the wed- 
ding guests lingered, the bride herself sitting 
once more apart, but with the birds singing 
in the topmost branches of her heart. Lis- 
tening through her silken curtains she again 
heard that now beloved voice once more 
addressing the guests : 

"Has the bridegroom sent back my mes- 
senger to say when he will come, or the 
reason for his strange delay? The hour 
grows late. This is a most dishonorable do- 
ing, that so beautiful a bride should be thus 
deserted at her wedding chair. Has my 
messenger returned?" 

And all the people, upon whose cloud of 



The River Dragon's Bride 141 

sorrow a great light was bursting, now 
shouted back to him, "No one has returned !" 

Then the second priest was named as mes- 
senger to the delinquent bridegroom, and 
upon his failure to return the wicked old 
priestess was sent the way of her confeder- 
ates in crime. 

Just as the red ball of the sun dropped 
down behind the mountains, and while the 
happy guests could scarce repress their joy 
until their splendid young ruler should finally 
speak, he slowly rose in his place and said, 
"The sun has set and though we have waited 
for him many hours, the much feared River 
Dragon, who for ten thousand moons has af- 
flicted the homes and hearts of my people, 
has not come to take his fair young bride. 
I have given him ample time to make good 
his ancient claim and he has failed. This 
winsome bride is not for him, and nevermore 
shall he curse my people or my country/' 

And all the people shouted with a great 
and joyous shout, "Death to the River 
Dragon ! Long live our king !" 

And he did live long, and with him, the 



142 The River Dragon's Bride 

sole Queen of his heart and kingdom, 
reigned the lovely Princess who would, but 
for him, have become the River Dragon's 
Bride. 

In memory of that great deliverance, to 
this very time, upon the fifth day of the fifth 
moon there are rowed upon the rivers of 
China the Dragon-Boat races, in all the bril- 
liance of their decoration, and whose sole 
guerdon for victory is a garland of flowers. 



O China! Are you yourself the Pretty 
Princess whom to-day your enemies, after 
stripping you of your jewels, both national 
and material, would consign to your doom 
beneath the murky waters of the River of 
Oblivion ? 

Hold fast to your courage, Pretty Prin- 
cess. Your own dauntless Deliverer shall 
yet come, and you too shall live happily ever 
after. 






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